Follow-up: The thing’s I’ve learned

Posted by Philip in Follow-up, Old Photo Critique, Photo Processing

I wanted to do my retouching on the photos I posted a couple days ago as quickly as possible.  The temptation is to spend a lot of time on post processing, especially when you are “trying to prove a point” so I had to time myself.  I decided to not take more than 5 minutes on either picture.

There’s not a lot one can do to correct the first image.  These are the things I did:

1. Red eye removal
2. Crop tight
3. Remove  clutter from background with content aware fill.
4. Clear a few spots from face.
5. Warming filter.

Cropping in tight helps to get you more engaged in the image, but since this was a 4MP image in the first place, the cropped images is only really of a reasonable size to display on the Internet.  I can’t make a decent print larger than a 4×6.

The second image I spent every moment of the 5 minute time limit and did:

1. Brighten eyes
2. Increased iris saturation
3. Saturated pink shirt.
4. Light skin smoothing (to reduce noise mainly.)
5. Darken background using a curve adjustment.
6. Add a warming filter.

So what do you think?  Is spending 5 minutes on an old image worth the time?

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Go back and fix the past

Posted by Philip in Old Photo Critique, Photo Processing

From time to time you need to go back to some of your old photos and see what a couple minutes with the new tools can do for them.  Nine years ago I got married and honeymooned at Disney World.  Since tomorrow is our anniversary, I took the first reasonable photo from the trip taken with an Olympus Point and shoot camera to see what it looked like.

Taking a close look at the image the color looks a little flat.  It’s likely because it was an over cast day, and there was some noise in the image.  So taking the editing capabilities of Camera Raw, I knocked out the noise, warmed the scene and added a bit more blue to the sky with a touch of negative clarity.  All-in-all a much better image.  If I knew then what I know now, I could have taken several shots from the same location and easily cloned out the people, so it would look like we had the place to ourselves.

What else can/should I do?

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Down Day, Down Week

Posted by Philip in General

It’s amazing that something so virtual can have such a physical world impact.  Last week one of the drives in my Drobo reported as being bad.  I couldn’t replace it since the replacement drive just went in to upgrading the total capacity.  So I ejected the drive and began moving and removing files I didn’t need to take it from a 4 disk array to 3 until the warranty replacement came in.  Right as I was about to reach the threshold for the redundancy to kick in, there was a file system corruption and the Drobo was locked.  I could read the files, but could no longer add, edit or delete.  So my Drobo has been locked for 5 days while waiting for the replacement drives.  Today they came in and I’ve learned the following from this experience:

1. I have a lot of files, 162 thousand of them are just photos.
2. It takes a lot of time to copy those files from one drive to another.  12 hours just for the photos, the total time will be close to 3 days including video.
3. I’m very glad I have multiple backups of my important and not so important files.
4. I need to spend some serious time cleaning house, both virtual and physical, because when the Drobo is down, the office and the house gets seriously messy.

Sorting through all the photos I found the oldest digital photo I had, which turned out to be a picture of me right after the long flight to Switzerland, taken with an Olympus D360L by Doug Morris (no relation) on May 18, 2000.  That was over 10 years ago and I feel drained like I looked on that day.  That was a great camera for a point and shoot even though it was slow.  It had wonderful low light sensitivity, ran off “AA” batteries and could fit in a pocket if you didn’t mind a huge bulge that made people stare at you with weird contorted faces.

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