Journal Entry for Wednesday, Mar 28th

Revisiting Your Photos

It’s funny how things work out sometimes. Just the other day I decided to review some of the picture postings on my  Photo Gallery site and found one that I had never been quite pleased with. As a result of this review I ended up converting it to a black and white image.  As you can see from the images above, the original photo was under exposed and provided little detail in the rock. After lightening it and recovering some of the detail that had been lost, it still had a blue cast present in the upper half of the image that I was not happy with. However, this (the 2nd photo) was the one that I published. The next image shows my third attempt at trying to improve this photo. By lightening it even more and changing the tint and tonal values, I brought some more natural rock color out which also helped to reduce the blue cast to a small degree. The final image shows the end result after converting it to a black and white. Not only did this solve the problem of the blue cast, it softened the background some more, accentuated the rock face by taking your attention away from the green foliage, and gave the whole image a somewhat “older” look. After replacing the previous image, I even gave it a new title. Check out the full image here and let me know what you think. The Guardian

Today’s Photo Tip: Make a periodic reviews of your picture library. Now here’s the ironic part. Just this morning I was reading a post on David duChemin’s blog site expounding the benefits of reviewing your images, both untouched negatives and previously edited photos, and looking at them with new perspective. (http://www.pixelatedimage.com/blog/2012/03/a-second-edit/) There have been several occasions in the past, when I have performed a re-edit and ended up with a better picture, either due to a new perspective or to a new editing feature or technique I have learned over the months since the original edit. Sometimes you will be surprised by how much you have learned over a period of months and years that you can now better apply to some of the older images in your library.