[sergeremy]

Not sure if this should be posted here as a "game", or in the processing sub-forum... I'd like to think of it as a game

Do you have older images that you were happy with back then (or unhappy with, for that matter), but think you could process better, or at least differently, today? They don't need to be very old, just enough that you can stand back and think about what you did then, and what you can do now. Post the first version, and maybe explain why you think it could be better. Then show us the new version. (If you want to show the original, unprocessed file, please do - no obligation, though.)


I'll start with this one from 2016:



I really liked the composition here, with the lights to the right counterbalancing the "portrait" to the left. But the fabric on the right shoulder was just impossible to do anything with. The lighting situation was pretty difficult (natural light from the window to the right, tungsten from the ceiling light slightly to the left, reflections from a mirror to the front:left of the model, and the two light sources to the right coming from the front right). I didn't expose at all for the model and ended up with what I thought was an unusable, underexposed file.

But a good part of the image came out ok to my eyes after pushing hard - most of it except the shoulder/sleeve fabric to the right. It had a blue colorcast from the sky out the window, while everything else was rather orangey from the lightbulbs. In monochrome, that translated to a rather dark grey, and I tried and tried, but could not get it less dark without it looking overprocessed or weird. Plus, there was this ugly shadow sticking out of the shoulder just a bit above.


So I left it there. Until the other day when I got the idea for this thread. This was the first image that came up while browsing my pictures and I immediately thought "why the heck did I not just try and crop?"

So here it is, after starting all over (yup, I reset everything to default and went back at it - still no way to get that shoulder back!). Nothing great, but it's definitely better to my eyes (at least today)!



I'll try to reprocess another one later, with no cropping involved.

[sergeremy]

Here's another. First version from 2015:




Like the first photo, this one had at least one big miss: focus! But I liked the composition and the guy with his kid in the foreground - and i've always loved circuses. In 2015 I was using the Sagelight Image editor (a great, intuitive editor which sadly disappeared into oblivion when it's author moved on to other things). I tried to camouflage the technical flaws by going sepia/vintagy. I kind of liked the results at the time.


I pulled it out a few minutes ago and immediately thought to go for something more contrasty, still vintage-like but without the sepia artifact. I'm now using ACDsee and, every so often, as I did here, I'll give the image a quick dip in SilverEfexPro (where I'll generally choose a preset - push-process in this case - and tweak from there). I also slightly modified the crop - feels a bit "tighter" this way.



So, that's another re-processed image! Where's yours?

[aaacb]

I don't have raw files that are too old, either lost them or didn't think to keep them past the first processing. But these are two scans, one year apart, of the same Superia 400 film, one from the lab and one after I had gotten my very own (flatbed) scanner. Just wanted to correct the green cast and slight underexposure.

[sergeremy]

And it worked out well. :-)