September 2012 image first post-processed in April 2020.
There are a number of circumstances that might cause you to revisit a composition and image that you already captured, either in its original folder or in person to recapture it.
It can be productive to re-edit older images with your latest software. Ansel Adams used to revisit and re-process his images in the darkroom, often producing vastly different interpretations. In early 2020 I’ve recently upgraded to Lightroom Classic CC and I’ve found the Lightroom Dehaze function to have interesting effects in some of my older work.
- You’ll discover new favorites. You may have been distracted by more dramatic moments, and missed some more subtle ones.
- You have more time or patience. You simply may not have head enough time to explore things that you can do with more difficult or time-consuming files to work with. No time to edit out dust spots or merge multiple exposures to increase dynamic range? Come back in a few weeks or months when you may have more free time or you may have more motivation to overcome the obstacles.
- You’ve added new software. You may have more options for producing black and white versions, for aligning multiple exposures, or you may have a snazzy new feature.
- Your skills with the software improve. Get on mailing lists to try new software packages and versions via free trial evaluation licenses from time to time. It’ll pay off.
- Your artistic vision, your intent, evolves. Try an artistic black and white? HDR? More aggressive contrast for a much more “moody” look? You’ll be better able to envision the possibilities as your experience grows and your tool set evolves.
This is a black and white image that I was only able to produce after I tried Silver Efex 2, which was being licensed for free after Google bought the software vendor that produced it:
OnOne Software sometimes allows photographers to license older versions of its software, obviously hoping that you’ll integrate it into your workshops then want the latest version. Seems like a a strategy that’s advantageous for everyone involved.
Here’s an example of an image that I hadn’t touched since the original field edit back in January 2009, but I updated it in 2018. I’m sure I could do even better with it now, and I suspect that I’ll keep working on this image for years to come.
2009 Mono Lake image re-processed in 2018.
In the field when I revisit sites I’ve been to before I’ll sometimes see something new about the scene, perhaps different weather or a different season which I’d like to have in my portfolio. Often, however, I find myself dismissing a site I’ve been to before… been there, done that… no need to fill up disk drives with redundant, near-duplicates of previous captures.
Lately though I’ve been re-capturing some shots I took only 3-4 years ago. My latest camera as I first wrote this in 2013, the Canon 5D Mark III, had more than double the resolution of the Canon 40D I was shooting with in 2008, it had more dynamic range, and less noise, particularly in underexposed areas. It’s true that buying a newer or more expensive camera won’t improve your attention to the most important aspects of photography such as composition and exposure, but there are some potential benefits to being able to shoot in lower light, capture a greater range of light with more subtle color transitions, and being able to print in larger sizes.
The other thing I’ve learned through leading roughly 60 special access sessions in the Wild West ghost town of Bodie is that rarely do re-shot scenes truly look the same. The sun angle changes from week to week, the strength of the Belt of Venus post-sunset color varies from night to night, and your post-processing approach may evolve from one year to the next. Take it. If you’re not motivated to post-process “the same” image now, you may have reason to do so and you may discover added value (like subtle anti-crepuscular rays in the sky) later when you take a slightly different post-processing approach.
Anti-crepuscular rays in Belt of Venus color shortly after sunset in Bodie.
The other problem with my 2008 images was the processing approach I embraced back then. HDR was becoming a popular fad, and it could produce catchy images which could get attention with other photographers and some image buyers. There was a major downside though, one described well in Tom Till’s article “Digital Pitfalls: A Cautionary Tale” in Outdoor Photographer Magazine:
“My conclusion, a few months later, is that I had wandered down a dangerous path. My innocent desires to imitate the colors of Velvia, to make a lifeless RAW file more interesting and to fix contrast problems with HDR were clearly failures, and I began to look at what I had done in a new light. As I viewed some images, I often said to myself, “What was I thinking?” I began to compare myself to an addict who had become enthralled with digital color and couldn’t be satisfied until I had sometimes grossly overdone things. Just realizing this and seeing the beautiful subtle colors I had buried was enough to help me come to terms with my problem. “
I could really identify with that when I read it in 2012. I had already come to the same conclusion about my own work. Too often I was revisiting old work I had produced using HDR techniques and concluded “What was I thinking?” Of course the next logical question is, “And why didn’t I notice this before?” Tom’s article offered one possible explanation: “A friend of mine mentioned a syndrome familiar to painters where, after years of looking at colors, an artist can become desensitized to them.” Musicians can lose their hearing from being exposed to loud noise, can our ability to assess the state of our photography become affected by overexposure to exaggerated color?
Fortunately there was a path out of my madness. Photoshop seemed like a similar trap, designed to help graphic artists manipulate and combine color images. The newer Adobe Lightroom software however was designed from the ground up to efficiently process photographs, with more of a focus on fine tuning adjustments than heavy-handed manipulations.
None of this is to say that there’s anything inherently wrong with HDR, I explained why I used it in 2008 in a blog post in early 2009:
Color Accuracy vs. Art in Photo Post-processing, the Case for HDR
http://www.jeffsullivanphotography.com/blog/2009/01/20/why-would-anyone-use-hdr-its-unreal/
Then I upgraded to a better camera and more powerful post-processing software. I do still use HDR some small percentage of the time, and I’ve gone out of my way to explain why there are some valid uses for it in other articles on my blog. I simply pay attention to not letting it become an addiction to flashy results. It can be a useful tool, but I don’t want HDR to dominate my approach, affect my judgement, or limit my audience.
So back to the original topic of revisiting places, when I do return to places now, it’s with a camera with greater dynamic range and a more successful workflow, with less of a need to use extreme post-processing to produce useful results.
Here’s a link to +Tom Till‘s article:
Digital Pitfalls: A Cautionary Tale
http://www.outdoorphotographer.com/how-to/shooting/digital-pitfalls-a-cautionary-tale.html
Here’s another Outdoor Photographer Magazine article on the subject by Bill Hatcher:
Keeping It Real, Or Calling It Art
http://www.outdoorphotographer.com/columns/photo-adventure/keeping-it-real-or-calling-it-art.html
Here are some of my own musings on post-processing using HDR:
http://www.jeffsullivanphotography.com/blog/?s=HDR&submit=Search
I had an adjacent horizontal composition of this November 2007 scene licensed by National Geographic in 2008, but I like my newer treatment of it even better:
Maybe you think you’ll never have time to post-process all these images. Will you retire, and have more free time and/or less mobility? Ever have an injury that you need to recover from? New for 2020-21: will you be told to shelter at home during a pandemic? Surely none of these will ever happen to us, but you never know. Capture a few extra images, re-process some old ones. You never know how well they might turn out!
For examples, consider my Photmatix album on Flickr, including many older images re-processed with the newer version 6 of the software. I also dabble with black and white results, my favorites lately being produced by Nik Collection Silver Efex 2.
Topaz Lake winter storm reflection.
Sunset over Ward Charcoal Ovens State Park, Nevada.
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Comments
aah…beautiful photography..!!
Perrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrfect pic =)
You do amazing work! How do you find all of these locations?
They are wonderful photos 😀
Question some of the clouds in the photo it looks nice, did you add motion in post processing or taken from your camera?
+Jeff Sullivan , amazingly wonderful, God has given u poetic eyes, with ur tallent. wht a detailing of the picture? shadow of hills r clear in a water, sky r playing with clouds too spontaneous, green land scape,
smoothing eyes………….splendid
GOOOOOOOD
very nice!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Excellent article. I think that we all look at our old work sometimes and ask "what was I thinking?"
May I also suggest that we owe the +Adobe Photoshop Lightroom designers a big thanks here too? The tools we are now using for our raw file development have come a long way. Like you, I dabbled with a lot of exposure blending tools a few years ago because I wanted more highlight or shadow detail. Now with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4's PV2012 controls I can often get all the detail I need out of a single frame!
This is a wonderful time to be a serious photographer! My style–my sense of color and contrast–is evolving; the capture technology that I use to create my starting point is continually improving, and the software that I use to polish the raw capture is getting better and better.
Wonderful!
maravilla
Wonderful… :)))))
Beautiful pictures
beautiful
Beautiful location,exlent
I like your new perspective +Jeff Sullivan , a very natural processing here. Well done!
excellent
Great article. "I don't want HDR to dominate my approach, affect my judgement, or limit my audience." And great selection of photos! Can't wait till your new book comes out.
Hi its a wonderful sight
Good picture nice peaceful view
Its really good
puck
My goodness! I'd love to receive this on a postcard! A Beauty. ;-*)
Absolutely gorgeous!
+Jeff Brooks-Manas Most of the locations are in National Parks, where there are two ways to find fairly accurate quality-ranked photos to find the most interesting locations. One is to browse a satellite map of the park while turning on the photos layer in +Google Earth, where photos are both mapped, and ranked by users of +Panoramio.
Another way to find the best locations in an entire park is to search Flickr for a term like the park name, then sort the photo results by "Interestingness" (which is determined by community response to each image, specifically corrected as much as possible to remove any errors or advantage created by the popularity of longtime users). It's surprising that +Marissa Mayer hasn't leverage this strategic advantage to develop a partnership with Facebook/Bing (or build it out into an entirely new social network with Apple, Microsoft, or a startup).
Beautiful xxxx
Thank you, Jeff, for this wonderful series of landscape-pic's …..
very nice
Fantastic reflections
beautiful..
ale widok 🙂
fantastic
Gud photography man
+David Marx I couldn't agree with you more. I'm going back through old files to select images for my upcoming book, and Lightroom 4 is so far ahead of what I could do with past post-processing software, I often find that even my fairly recent work processed in Lightroom 3 benefits from a complete re-process in LR 4.2.
Thank You for this Insight!!!
These are 2-3 years into my HDR phase +Dominique Dubied, so I had gotten pretty good as minimizing the worst artifacts of HDR processing. I'd use Photomatix as gently as I could, then often bring the result into Photoshop, and layer my best possible single file edit on top to restore reality and color as much as I could, while still gaining some recovery of shadow and highlight detail from the HDR. That was really tedious and time-consuming though, so sometimes I'd just run three exposures through the Batch – Average mode in Photomatix to get the benefit of greater dynamic range without the issue of tone mapping destruction of color and realism. Best of all, that average mode works unrestricted in the free trial version.
So these older examples run the full range of success from realistic (probably a single exposure) to really wacky. The most appealing ones are probably still just a little on the over-processed side, standing out for exactly that reason. At least I think I can spot them better now, see my work from a different perspective, and re-process or re-shoot them when my goals have changed. It's probably healthy to change post-processing tools every few years to be able to look back at older work with a fresh perspective.
God!! what a beauty…..
Amazing spread +Jeff Sullivan !
WoW Awesome photo's!! *0
es precioso, y pensar que hay personas que lo único que pueden ver son edificios y concreto
wow cool pic
Super cool locations:-)
+Joseph Zee Any apparent motion in clouds would reflect actual motion in the clouds (and be captured in-camera).
Aside from my past and now occasional detour into HDR (which includes many of these results from 2008, some with pleasant results and some I cringe at today), I prefer to keep processing at a level where it doesn't grab attention more than the intended subject.
That's different from an obsession with "as shot", since a camera does not see at all like we see and perceive a scene. That bias would not only be far too limiting, it totally disregards our actual experience. If I take a RAW file straight from a camera onsite and process it in a matter of seconds and compare it with the scene is making me say "Wow!", I'd bet that 9 times out of 10 the straight-out-of-camera (SOOC) result will fail to generate the same response.
While I do try to produce "as seen" images (different from SOOC in that I will try to recreate what I saw, not what the camera recorded), it has been well researched and shown that human memory is almost non-existent, so I know that the best I can possibly do even with the best of intentions is realistic.
There is room for creative license in that process. To me the gift that Ansel Adams had was his ability to produce images which appeared to be reasonable conversions of a color scene to a black and white result. He often spent a dozen hours manipulating a print to his satisfaction, but in the end the processing did not overshadow the subject. He readily encouraged the use of creativity in the process of photography, but his example demonstrated extreme skill and a degree of restraint which hid the manipulations from most viewers. An experienced photographer can often recognize when he used a red filter to darken a blue sky and increase contrast, but the end result should still be the same "wow" that Ansel Adams experienced when standing by the monolith of Half Dome.
The "What the heck did he do to that photo?" response that some of the old HDR results I've included here no doubt generates dooms many of these to not feature prominently in any serious portfolio of my work (except to illustrate a point about over-processing and restraint).
Beautiful album and very well thought out +Jeff Sullivan! I'm one to admit that when I started learning HDR, I went full force as well, going for it on almost every image, but over the last year of shooting and meeting up with so many photographers to learn from, I'm finding that there are many times, even if I bracket a scene, that I can and feel confident enough with just one of the frames to pull out an image. HDR is still a tool I enjoy to use, but now it's just that, a tool rather than a style for each and every image.
I've also been using Photomatix since learning about HDR, and I do like the details it brings out in the image, but I do layer mask in parts of the original frames to bring it back down to my personal preference. I've always liked looking back at my past images and seeing that trail of improvement, but that also has me thinking the same as you, which is "what was I thinking back then?" He he. I've even re-added a bunch of past images in my "processing now" folder so that I can re-process them. If for nothing else just to see how I would work it differently now than back when I originally processed it.
That is beautiful!
Beautiful photos
Great article, +Jeff Sullivan I know how you feel, especially after scanning a big bunch of old slides last summer myself; it can be quite unnerving thinking you have to go back to some of the places you visited before in order to get a similar picture of higher quality..
Another beautiful photograph, it captures the magnificence of the landscape. Where was this taken?
+Trevor Downing The cover photo was taken at Schwabacher's Landing in Grand Teton National Park. I've been visiting the park for decades, so I'm thinking of offering a landscape photography workshop there later this year or next.
fake pic… that's from mars
Reminds me flyfishing Sutter lake cascades
Very nice setting great shot Sir .
I would like to go there one day. I haven't been to the States in over 20 years when I visited the Grand Canyon, the Valley of Fire State Park and the Mojave Desert but my ambition is to see some more National Parks.
Superbe
thank you for your beautiful photos .each time I look at one of them it's as if I was travelling !I live in the Loire Valley in france .here it's the same , the colours change every day . even in one day it's always different from morning to evening and you always discover something new . this is what we must appreciate in Nature ,what it offers us .
…Wóóóów!!!!….
Wow, I really appreciate your insights, on a number of levels. I am at an earlier, perhaps steeper, portion of my own learning curve on these issues, and having just made the jump from an older crop sensor (450d) to FF (5d mIII), I am finding that I am beginning to see past the techniques, so to speak, to understand better what I need to do to my files to achieve my vision of the scene, rather than letting the techniques dictate the end result. Although much of what I shoot is bracketed, I find myself using fewer frames, and many times using a single frame, almost to my surprise, to process an image. It seems that the technical manipulations required are becoming less and less, and it is my hope that there will be increasingly less distraction between the capture and the final vision of a scene.
Also, I have completed a "first round" trip to many of the National Parks, and feel as though I have just scratched the surface of what there is to capture. I understood that going in, and my first trips have usually concentrated on capturing some of the iconic views in these locales, but it is almost a foregone conclusion that I need to go back, to seek out different perspectives, different weather, and even to allow serendipity to improve my future images. Part of the reason that Ansel Adams, for instance, is credited with such memorable images of Yosemite, for instance, is that he invested an incredible amount of TIME there. I don't see going back as just an effort to reproduce what I have done, but to do something different, if not better.
Thanks for sharing a very nice and inspiring body of work.
Unbelievable!
beautiful
Exquisite!
Your pictures are absolutely beautiful!
so lovely pic
nice…….
Some majestic photos here, peaceful and inspiring, the work of someone who's taken the time to see beyond the surface of things and allows the rest of us to peer into nature a little deeper.
Just starting to receive and look at some of your albums. How magnificent they are! They feed my SOUL! KdeL
fine
Nice work…
There were a few that were labeled California Coast and a few of them looked familiar. Have you been through Humboldt and/or Del Norte Counties? We have beaches and redwood trees. If you haven't been, I encourage you to come see it. Though not as many prominent mountains as you seem to like to capture. But lots of green mountains, rivers and trees.
sooooo beautyful
Very beautiful! +Jeff Sullivan
cute
Praise the Lord! Great shooting! Through your photos I can see the great creation from the God! such a wonderful world! Hey may the Lord continue blessing you on your photographing gift!
COLOURS!!! <3
nice!!!
so beautiful pictures….
good
so beauty
so beautyfull place
Thats real pretty
good one
waaaaaaaaaaaw good travels.
I'm finding +Mark Esguerra that I'm not just re-processing old HDRs… even images from 2011 that I adjusted in Lightroom 3 are turning out better in Lightroom 4. For one thing, the color maps built in to translate RAW files into the image shown on the screen just seem to be better. I do find though that my use of Lightroom has changed though. Coming off of an HDR binge, I liked Clarity to be way up in the 25 to 50 range, accentuating detail a bit like HDR Tone Mapping. Lately though I've been preferring Clarity closer to 5-10, or even 0. I find it more productive to remove distractions, to minimize barriers likely which might prevent viewers from being able to focus on the subject of the image.
Thanks +Andrew Wisler, your journey sounds very familiar as I went from the Canon XT?XTi/40D to 5DII/5DIII. You might find some of these articles on my blog interesting: http://www.jeffsullivanphotography.com/blog/?s=technique&submit=Search
Yes +Sharon Reid, I believe some of these photos were taken on Greenwood Beach south of Mendocino, a few others were by Crescent City. I like the Jenner to Point Arena to Fort Bragg area for both photography and abalone diving. I tend to pass through Humboldt, Redwood National Park and Crescent City on my way to the Oregon Coast.
It's funny that you mention that about the Clarity slider +Jeff Sullivan, because I've come to the same mentality as you. I was really pleased with how Clarity was improved for LR4 and went slider happy for a while, but these days it's rare that I punch it past 15 or 20 if at all. And that's a great point to try and remove distractions from the subject. I would also prefer it if a viewer is able to see the subject I present rather than be distracted by any processing (HDR or otherwise).
I am finding that with the resolution of newer FF DSLRs, there is more than enough detail in the RAW files. Although it is tempting and even appropriate to add a touch of local contrast, it is a useful exercise to purposely abstain from increasing detail. It is an easy trap to fall into over processing (and looking at my older files, one I've been guilty of), and perhaps if we studied painters more we would gain a more balanced feel for light, color and detail.
Then again +Andrew Wisler, I like Picasso… if I looked to his painting style for inspiration in my photography, I'd be spending a lot more time in Photoshop!
Well, I was thinking more along the lines of the realists … Perhaps Rembrandt. Although Dali is nice too … I suppose my point, as I think yours is also, is that a diet rich in hyper-detailed imagery (or even HDTV, for that matter) probably skews ones artistic vision, and balancing that with imagery which conveys an strong emotive element but without the minute detail may be a cure. The old masters understood light in a way that was profound, and looking back at those paintings with a photographer's eye is inspiring.
+Andrew Wisler If you're ever in Las Vegas, the little art museum at the Bellagio is amazing (the Picasso restaurant is great too). The last time I was in Paris I walked every hall of the Louvre, but I did find the Picasso museum particularly intriguing. The degree of skill and control exercised by the masters really does provide some perspective for photographers. Even (or especially) in the unrealistic work, the subject is the focus of the work, not the treatment. That,for me, was Ansel Adams' genius, he'd pre-visualize an unrealistic treatment, but master the presentation through many hours of darkroom work, until just the right light values were present all over the image to present the subject the way he wanted, with little or no intrusion on your viewing and reaction from all that manipulation. Ansel's achieved essentially the opposite end point of most of today's simplistic over-processing, where the technique commands the most attention, grossly overshadowing the subject (if there is one from the standpoint of a focus of attention deliberately supported by a conscious composition, beyond simply pointing the camera in a general direction where perhaps some clouds look cool).
You can rent the movie "Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies" via Netflix and sometimes see it aired on DirecTV or cable, and ironically early cubism was apparently influenced by photography: early films.
OK, +Jeff Sullivan, I'll have to give Picasso a closer look. Ansel Adams' technique was essentially to take a very detailed negative (LF film) exposed to capture the full range of light, and essentially (literally in his case) paint with light to capture the emotion of the image. He let the detail, which is ample in those negatives, speak for itself. Essentially, after lo these many years, we are nearly at the same point with digital capture, that we have the same order of detail in our RAW files, and can use analogous techniques (white point, black point, curve manipulations, which is what push and pull processing was all about), as well as local light enhancement (dodging and burning) to bring out the emotion in our images, but the detail is already there and we don't really need to enhance it much. I think it's a very exciting time to be a landscape photographer (though I do sometimes miss the smell of hypo!)
it's odd to think that i've been there , done that because wherever I am now is someplace I wasn't a moment before…my outlook is constantly changing , thinking why did I stop here ? what was it that caught my eye ? The world is constantly changing , maybe the light is different or a tree has fallen and created a sculpted design in the foreground . Later when the image goes through post – process I will attempt to illustrate these thoughts and hopefully succeed in sharing my view of the world with someone else . Unless I try to duplicate exactly a scene from the past then it is never the same…this is also a way to discover yourself though photography.
nice pic
Beautyful Pic!
co za uroda 😀
thankyou for sharing