A Day on the Bay — © Copy­right 2012 by William Beem

A Day on the Bay

I shot these scene at Portofino Bay about two and a half years ago. Some of those images I really loved, and then there was this one. I just never loved the way I processed the image, and I was also a bit unhappy with the ghost­ing of some boats in the water. It was a breezy day and those skiffs were fly­ing all over the water. I’ve since decided to accept a bit of ghost­ing in some images, so that doesn’t bother me quite so much. That left the issue of pro­cess­ing to revisit.

Some folks swear they never go back and re-​process old images. I think that’s fine if it suits them. For my own needs, I like tweak­ing with things. Even to the point of tweak­ing images that I found quite sat­is­fy­ing. That’s partly because I’ve improved a bit here and there and learned new tech­niques. It’s also because the soft­ware keeps get­ting bet­ter. This HDR image came from Pho­to­shop CS6’s HDR Pro — some­thing I used to hate.

What I like about HDR Pro now, per­haps even love, is the abil­ity to cre­ate a 32-​bit TIFF file from my brack­eted expo­sures. Pho­to­shop has does a great job with align­ment and ghost con­trol. Once I have the TIFF, I can treat this as a sin­gle file. There’s no need for tonemap­ping or mask­ing in parts of the brack­eted expo­sures to com­pen­sate for some dingy areas in a Radi­ance file. Instead, I can launch Adobe Cam­era RAW and tweak the image with a few slid­ers to get won­der­ful results from all of the depth in the 32-​bit TIFF.

After that, then I can decide if I want to add a bit more pro­cess­ing in Pho­to­shop using some plu­g­ins. For this image, I used Nik’s Color Efex Pro to add some Pro Con­trast, Clas­si­cal Soft Focus and Darken/​Lighten Cen­ter. The next thing you know, it’s A Day on the Bay.

If you’re on the fence about re-​visiting some of your old pho­tos, I say to go for it. What do you have to lose?