As I was going through the pains of reducing my photo storage, it was a fun experience to go back to my early work and see if there was anything worth keeping. While deleting a large collection of panoramic images, I found a couple that I ended up saving. Interestingly, I realized that at the time I was taking these photos, Lightroom had no panorama capabilities to create a single DNG image out of RAW shots (I used PTGui and Photoshop at the time). So I selected a few vertical panoramic shots captured at different shutter speeds (obviously, I had no idea how to capture panoramas at the time) and let Lightroom do its magic.
Captured with Nikon D700 and Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8G
To my surprise, the panorama stitched perfectly, and the end result looked quite good. After a few changes with the sliders and some healing spot removals, I extracted the image in both 4K and 8K resolution to share with our readers.
If you would like to download the 4K and 8K versions of the panoramas, here are the links:
Lessons learned:
- Don’t delete the original RAW / DNG files for the images you care about. Software will only get better in the future, and you might want to go back, revisit and possibly even re-edit those images. Your editing preferences and even display hardware might also change in the future.
- Modern software is pretty darn good at compensating for small photographic errors and variables. A panorama obviously needs to be shot at the same shutter speed, aperture and ISO. But if you already made the mistake, feed those images into post-processing software and see what it can do. In this particular case, Lightroom automatically compensated for the shutter speed differences by adjusting the brightness of each image to average them all out. In addition, I remember I dropped my 24-70mm f/2.8G on the ground right before that trip (ouch), so parts of the image were soft. Lightroom did a solid job of only keeping the sharp areas of the photo.
- Even if your older images were shot with low-resolution cameras (D700 had a 12 MP sensor), you might still be able to upscale images and make them look better. The upscaling technology has already gotten really good, and it is only going to get better from here. For the 8K version of the image, I upscaled it using Lightroom “Enhance” (Super Resolution) feature, then downscaled it to 8K during the export process.
- Photographers often chase after “blood red” sunrises and sunsets, and I am certainly guilty of being one of them. Interestingly, those red colors didn’t work out so well for me when I needed prints for my house walls – colors were too vibrant and there wasn’t any furniture with similar colors to match. B&W, yellow, green and blue colors were much easier to work with in comparison. Although I have sunrise versions of the same scene, I prefer the above image for both print and display view. So I am glad that I stuck around after sunrise and took these shots.
Please enjoy these images and feel free to use them in any way you would like!
This is a interesting update on cleaning up old photographs.
My idea is: do not throw away things so easely.
A hard disk of 20TB cost 350€ and may can contain a life full of photographs.
Deleting photographs is best to do directly after the shots, when you ( still) know were it is all about.
I meet a lot of people that want to clean up there photographs and it takes a lot of time and effort, and may introduce mistakes that you throw away the photo you liked.
Looking through all your old photographs however will reflect on you as a photographer like looking in the mirror and will expose the magic of the photograph: bringing back memories at the hand of an image.
About new techniques that make more possible : yes, AI noise reduction and extrapolation make grainy photos much more usuable than some years ago.
I just printed a 120-cm wide print from a Nikon1 J5 camera and it looks marvelous.
I rediscovered the nikon1 camera lately and some lenses are really good like the 6.7-11mm lens. Not to mention the 70-300mm lens. a well made super tele lens of 500grams.
(810mm in FF)
“Lightroom did a solid job of only keeping the sharp areas of the photo.” – was that pure luck or is this an actual feature that Lightroom now has (I feel like I am failing to keep up…)?
I honestly don’t know. To be fair, I did quite a bit of overlap of images for the panorama at the time, and it could just be dumb luck that it worked out, but I do not see any soft parts of the image in the resulting photo.
That’s why we should not use too heavvy hand on our catalogues!
20 yrs ago I was taking burst (well…….sequences) of pictures of my (at that time) little daughter, e.g. eating an ice cream with a Coolpix 7100.
18 years later (and many cameras after) I prepared a book as a present for her and these photos become a double page with 64 tiny shoots of her.
The effect on people is incredible. It seems to have my little baby doing actions in front of them and everybody like it. Even my wife, who doesn’t like my photos (she’s right) was without words.
I know – this is sentimental – nothing to do with business or fine art. But every amateur has these photos.
More seriously: old pictures taken with a D800 10 years ago at 6400 ISO now, with new NR softwares, are completely different. White-head eagles shoot in British Columbia in 2016 under the rain now look beautiful.
If the shoot has a meaning, keep it.
I agree! While I am being quite selective for most of nature and commercial photography, I am generally leaving family photos intact for similar reasons. Those memories are too precious!
Yep, been there also. As my prior comment reg reducing the number of photos in storage, going from 500K to 250K photos in the prior article, I came across many photos that I said to myself, what was I thinking. I quickly edited them and posted them to my portfolio on my website. Of course, since I limit my main portfolio to 100 images, I had to delete a few of my other portfolio level photos to accommodate my new additions.
Thanks for sharing! Yeah, looking back, I would re-edit most of my early work. Some were so bad that I just deleted the edited TIFF files and only kept the Lightroom version in the original RAW format.