Now that I have finally got back up to date with my processing after falling nearly two years behind because of the course with the Open College of the Arts, printing for the gallery and preparing for the RPS distinction, I thought I would sort out any anomalies in my Lightroom catalog.
It was whilst doing this that I started to look though some of my very early digital images.
This image was taken on the island of Rhodes in 2008. It was taken with a tiny Nikon Coolpix 4100 compact which was a 3 megapixels camera that shot only jpg’s. It was during this holiday I had started to enjoy taking photographs again after a few years in the photographic ‘wilderness’ and was contemplating buying a better camera once I was home.
When I got back home I then tried using a piece of software called Lightroom that was still in its first version (in fact Lightroom was 10 years old this January) on the picture. I had no idea what the Lightroom modules were or how it all was supposed to work. I blundered my way through and this was the result.
I have no firm data on what I did to the image to get it like this, but I’m pretty sure it was cropped then blasted with the contrast, the vibrance and the sharpening sliders. You can see that it is horribly over-sharpened and full of noise and artefacts.
I then began to wonder what I would do different today, so I used the original and tried processing again. I made less of a crop, and duplicated a balcony in the bottom right corner to get rid of the arch, which distracted the eye too much. After that it was convert to monochrome and then my usual processing workflow. I also used the Photoshop plugin, Nik Dfine, to get rid of the artefacts and noise. I quite like it now. I call it ‘the Hive’.
Why not look back at some really old images and see what you can do to them now to get either a different image or to see how your processing may have improved.
sensored-view.com 