Salvage Saturday

[Ben Egbert]

Time to pile on with your reworked or overlooked images

this is from a pull out on highway 12 just above the Escalante bridge. I was camping at Calf Creek and got up for a sunrise here

 

[AlanLichty]

Nice morning light - one of my favorite areas of southern Utah.

 

[Ben Egbert]

Nice morning light - one of my favorite areas of southern Utah.

Thanks Alan it’s one of mine too

 

[AlanLichty]

My salvage for today is inspired by the lovely desert blooms I have been seeing images of lately. This pair of images is a pretty deep archive dive into some scanned Ektachrome slides taken with a Minolta twin lens reflex camera in the 1960's in the desert area around Phoenix. I have no idea if these scenes are even still in the desert or are now covered by suburbs to be honest.

 

[Ben Egbert]

Wow Alan these are exceptional for scans and stand on their own as beautiful images

 

[AlanLichty]

Wow Alan these are exceptional for scans and stand on their own as beautiful images

Thanks Ben - both of these utilized both DxO PureRAW3 as well as work with Topaz Denoise AI amongst other tweaks.

 

[Kyle Jones]

Here a three images I reworked this week.

1) Sunrise at Diamond Beach in Iceland. I have played with this before, trying to blend different exposures to get all of the icebergs sharp as they rolled around in the surf. This is a single image and I selected the one that had the foreground I liked best. I tried using DXO PureRaw on this one but it created some really weird artifacts in the foreground ice.

2) This is a local scene from a few years ago where I had always struggled to bring out the color in the sunset but still have it work well with the foreground hills and trees. This was processed with PureRAW and then finished in PhotoShop.

3) This is a rework of one of my favorites from Havasu Falls. I was going for a better balance between the canyon and the sky.

 

[Ken Rennie]

2 images from 2010. The first from Iona when I managed to overexpose the shot by 2 stops. I have processed this before but was very heavy handed. It may look like the Caribbean but 20 minutes later the dark cloud on the far right had started to drop lots of snow, this was February. Again on the far right you may see a flag, this is a golf course so if you want to come bring a few clubs and play golf the way it used to be. No greens, no rough, the course is "cut" by grazing sheep and cows. The 18 hole course is free but you may wish to pay $1.20 for a scorecard which has a map of the course otherwise you need to guess which hole is which. Don't bring a lot of clubs as you need to carry them from the ferry, no visitors cars allowed and the locals usually keep their cars on Mull.

2010 again but much warmer. This is Aiguèze in the South of France from a cycling trip.

 

[Ben Egbert]

Here a three images I reworked this week.

1) Sunrise at Diamond Beach in Iceland. I have played with this before, trying to blend different exposures to get all of the icebergs sharp as they rolled around in the surf. This is a single image and I selected the one that had the foreground I liked best. I tried using DXO PureRaw on this one but it created some really weird artifacts in the foreground ice.
View attachment 57730

2) This is a local scene from a few years ago where I had always struggled to bring out the color in the sunset but still have it work well with the foreground hills and trees. This was processed with PureRAW and then finished in PhotoShop.
View attachment 57726

3) This is a rework of one of my favorites from Havasu Falls. I was going for a better balance between the canyon and the sky.
View attachment 57725

Fantastic series Kyle I am surprised by the artifacts you mentioned be sure to turn off lens correction in ACR as DXO has already done the job and creates artifacts with double corrections

 

[Ben Egbert]

2 images from 2010. The first from Iona when I managed to overexpose the shot by 2 stops. I have processed this before but was very heavy handed. It may look like the Caribbean but 20 minutes later the dark cloud on the far right had started to drop lots of snow, this was February. Again on the far right you may see a flag, this is a golf course so if you want to come bring a few clubs and play golf the way it used to be. No greens, no rough, the course is "cut" by grazing sheep and cows. The 18 hole course is free but you may wish to pay $1.20 for a scorecard which has a map of the course otherwise you need to guess which hole is which. Don't bring a lot of clubs as you need to carry them from the ferry, no visitors cars allowed and the locals usually keep their cars on Mull.
View attachment 57731

2010 again but much warmer. This is Aiguèze in the South of France from a cycling trip.
View attachment 57732

Very nice recovery on the first and both are lovely images

 

[Kyle Jones]

Fantastic series Kyle I am surprised by the artifacts you mentioned be sure to turn off lens correction in ACR as DXO has already done the job and creates artifacts with double corrections

I was surprised too. I think it was trying to draw detail out of something that didn't really exist. On the left is what I had in Lightroom after running Adobe's enhanced RAW routine. On the right is PureRAW 3.

 

[AlanLichty]

I was surprised too. I think it was trying to draw detail out of something that didn't really exist. On the left is what I had in Lightroom after running Adobe's enhanced RAW routine. On the right is PureRAW 3.

I have seen PureRAW (both 2 and 3) do this with OOF objects before. There are certain types of moire like patterns that both PureRAW and Topaz fall into this trap as well. There are limits to what can and can't be recovered.

 

[Ben Egbert]

Gotcha Kyle, I am not sure I ever saw this effect before but perhaps I am not looking close enough

 

[Kyle Jones]

I stick with the idea that no tool is perfect. Having lots of tools available definitely helps when something doesn't work as you expect.

 

[AlanLichty]

My basic philosophy is that you can never have too many tools. This applies to both hardware and software and not confined to photography/computers