Back to the Past

The other night I found myself looking through my external hard drive at old images that I took with my Pentax K100D Super along with a few from the Nikon D90 that I never finalized. Luckily for these images, I’ve learned new techniques in PSE8 and I applied them to these images. One of the neat aspects about photography is there is always new techniques, equipment and software that comes out as technology improves so it’s great to see what these things can do to your old images.

The majority of these images were originally take in jpeg so I did change them to tiff’s to be able to open them more often without degrading the image. The tiffs were opened up in PSE8 and from there I used the big 3 as I like to call them to adjust the images: curves, hue/saturation and levels. Using these three adjustments with layer masks allowed me to change exactly what I wanted in the image to improve it. Part of the layer masks were brushed away in areas of the image that I didn’t want the adjustments to take effect.

Another new technique that I’m  starting to use is sharpening the image with a high pass sharpen filter by creating another layer of the main image. By creating this layer, I’m able to change the blend mode and opacity level until I get the sharpness I like.

The favorite of the bunch for me is the rainbow that formed over Hole #3 at Lake Panorama National Golf Course in the spring of 2008. I strictly remember it had just rained and I was going home from a long day of work and just happened to see the rainbow start to form. I had the Pentax dslr in the Jeep and quickly went to the par 3 and snapped the rainbow. If I remember correctly, it wasn’t there for just one or two minutes before it was gone so once again, it was about being at the right place at the right time.

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