I’ve been going through photographs and then performing a second edit.
I recommend doing this at the
6 month
1 year
2 year
I am going through and grabbing some photos, putting them in a side collection in Lightroom.
I’m trying to go through those photographs and do some re-editing to them and either trying to do some re-cropping or color editing. I am doing this to see if there’s a different photograph I can pull out of it. I’m taking a subject that I had placed in the center of the photograph. I’m pulling it to a side or one of the thirds of the picture. I’ll do some re-cropping to restructure the images.
I’m also going back through and doing some re-color editing, which works pretty well. Part of it is the adjustments you make to the photographs, the specific changes you make to a raw file to make it look visually the way you want. So you can end up with a whole new, artistic expression of that photograph.
It’s cool to go back through the pictures and rework them. Re-editing past images works better with work that’s maybe more than a year old or more than six months old, at the least. I like doing it with photos that are about two years old. That’s where I’ve gotten it out of my mind enough. Then, I can go back through and look at those images with fresh eyes.
I can go back through that photograph, make it a virtual copy in Lightroom. Then make additional edits to it in a way that I hadn’t before, which is fantastic. I was leaning toward changes like the color, warmth, or coolness—shifting toward a blue or purple tone. Color temperature adjustments change changes the emotional impact of a photograph.
I like shifting these color photographs into black and white conversions. I have some black and white conversions posted on my blog post. I’ve been going back through a lot of photographs and doing these black and white conversions. I am trying to work with the color mixer to get these more dramatic effects in the black and white where you can go in and pull the blue channel down to be dark or bright in the mix of the black and white image. Adjusting the color mixer can bring out a lot of these tonal contrasts are like using a polarizer.