Revisiting Work with a New Perspective; Finding Balance in Post-processing

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.

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.

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.

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