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Don't delete the old stuff!

Ben Rubinstein

Active member
I went with my wife to Iceland in 2005 for a week's shooting. We lived in a 4X4 for a week booking into a hotel only once and driving some 20 hours a day. I had seen incredible stuff coming out of Icelands landscapes on the net and fancied a piece of the action! The trip was disappointing photographically to be honest though certainly an experience. I ended up with just 6 keepers out of the whole trip. I later realised that I wasn't a landscape photographer by nature, if I didn't have anything to say with my pictures then the pictures pretty much didn't say anything at all. I never deleted the RAW though and certain images which I had seen in my mind when I shot, just never happened due to my lack of ability using the current software to make those pictures happen. The camera was a Canon 1Ds which is still very hard to process for and the RAW programs were far more basic then.

Anyway today I was musing about just how incredible modern software and I wondered if I could ever make some of those images work that I'd failed with 6 years ago.

Boy but it makes a difference having modern software. The 1Ds RAW files are still a pig to process but I now have the tools to do it and where once cloning out the 140 odd dust spots (no exaggeration) was hours of work, now I can do it in minutes, literally. These following pictures have perhaps 2 or 3 layers maximum each in PS, all the hard grunt work was done in ACR. I'm really happy with the first two, version of pictures that I'd processed to a similar result in the past, I even showed the 2nd one here once but it looked horribly ugly at anything but web size due to noise, banding, artifacting, a very significant crop, etc. The 3rd is a picture that I just couldn' t have made in the past without an incredible amount of photoshop tweaking from a RAW file from which it would have been incredibly difficult to extract the available information in the first place.



Landmannalaugar Sunset


Krafla Highway Dawn


Krafla Steam
 

Ben Rubinstein

Active member
Here's another I just rustled up, trying to keep the horrific colour noise out of that mountain while maintaining the colour is what made me give up on this one back in 2005. Now it's just a simple slider. Heaven!


Myvatn
 

TRSmith

Subscriber Member
Lovely landscapes and a worthwhile lesson. I had a similar revelation a couple years ago when I decided to try some previously disappointing Nikon D2Xs files in C1Pro. Suddenly the camera seemed magnificent when I was able to see what a good processing software could do with the files. It changed my mind about the camera and forever made me a fan of C1Pro. So I agree that it can be worthwhile to revisit the "old" stuff now and then with better tools and more skill/experience.

Best,
Tim
 
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