Post Processing – Before And After

Every once in a while I like to go back through my photography, sometimes I’ll travel back years in my DeLorean portfolio to review photography that didn’t make the cut (photos I didn’t bother editing).  My tastes change from year to year and photographs I really liked I may now dislike and ones I disliked may appeal to me.  I like to think that as I improve my mind for photography I see things differently from year to year.  The photograph you see here was taken on Lake George in New York and never made it onto my editing block.

0714_untitled_078-2
The reason it didn’t initially make the cut was, at first look, the photograph doesn’t have any real depth…  although the scene certainly had depth I didn’t feel as though I captured it.  Part of the it could have been because I was using a longer lens which tends to bring far off objects closer to the foreground and compress them.

This time around the image caught my eye and I thought I could use my dodge and burn tools to try to give the image a little life.

0714_untitled_078

By reducing the highlights (that’s the burning part) I was able to give the sky some detail and depth.  Once I had some depth in the sky it was just a matter of making the foreground trees stand out against the mountain in the background.  For this I used the dodging technique as well as the highlights slider in Lightroom 5.

The shot was taken as the sun was going down so I adjusted the color of the image to match that of what I remember from when the shot was taken.  All of these changes were easy to make because I shot in RAW format on my camera.

When was the last time you went through your unedited images?  In this part of the world, this is the perfect time to spend a little time on the computer and see what you can find because the weather is so dang cold.  If you’d like to share some of your rescued images feel free to do so on our Facebook page.

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