Saturday, January 29, 2011

Reworking Old Photos



Night Heron in Flight (juvenile) 2005

[Click on any image for a larger view]
 It seems as software gets more and more sophisticated and one's editing skills improve, there is always a desire to go back and re-edit old photos.  On that topic, I often tell my friends that I don't think any of us will live long enought to go back and fix all of the images we'd like to fix.  But accepting that as reality, it's still fun to take some time now and then to dabble a little bit just to see the difference between our editing skills now, versus what they were back whenever.

I have been cleaning up some old computer files this weekend and deleting a lot of old images that I no longer feel are worth holding onto.  But in that process I stumbled across a few photos I couldn't resist taking time to rework.

I've been using Photoshop CS5 since it was released a last year and I believe it is absolutely the best upgrade Adobe has ever released in the CS line of software.  Adobe Camera Raw version 6 (raw image editor) is absolutely amazing compared to even the last version that preceded it.  The improvements in ACR alone make CS5 worth the upgrade price. 

The first image above of a juvenile night heron in flight, is a lucky shot I made back in 2005 with my first ever DSLR, a Canon 10d.  It typically could not focus fast enough to track a moving bird, but I got lucky on this attempt.  This is still one of my favorite shots of all the birds in flight I have photographed since.

Here are a few images I reworked today...



Tricolor Heron in breeding plumage, 2009
 

Red Shoulder Hawk, 2008



Yellow Crowned Night Heron, 2010
  

 

Meadowlark, 2008
 


Wood Stork (nest building), 2009
 


Great Egret with nesting material, 2009