This isn’t about restoring vintage photos. But it has a bit of that sense to it. It also is about restoring old photos and turning decent images into better images.

Not long ago I read an article about coming back to your old photos to see if there may be some hidden gems that you’ve overlooked. I realized that I had imported quite a few of my B.L. (Before Lightroom) photos into Lightroom, but had never made the time to consider whether they were worth revisiting.

Finding a bit of time one day, I began looking through some of the oldies. I quickly realized that there were some that deserved some work, and flagged them for future review. When I got back to them, I could really see the difference that Lightroom made (no, I am not getting anything from Adobe for saying so!).

A good example is the photo at right, from a 2008 visit to Chipping Campden, in the Cotswolds region in England. Taken from inside the historic old market, and capturing riders on horseback passing by in the bright spring daylight, there is a lot of contrast, and, even though the image was captured in RAW format, there is a lot of data lost in the highlights and shadows. This image had been processed using Gimp, but I wasn’t able to bring out the values I was looking for.

So I decided to see what Lightroom could do.

I began by straightening the image just a little, then adjusting the white and black clipping levels, which returned a bit of detail to the sky and the inside of the market. To do this, I use a technique I learned from Matt Kloskowski. Hold down the Alt or Option key while sliding the blacks (or whites) slider, adjusting until the colors just barely disappear. Now you have the full range of blacks to whites, and you can adjust shadows and highlights.

After opening up the shadows, I discovered that there were some spots along the pathway, so I used the spot healing brush to remove them. I also adjusted the saturation to make the buildings across the street pop a bit more. While opening up the shadows had revealed a little detail inside the arched doorway of the market, there wasn’t nearly enough. So next I used LightRoom’s adjustment brush to paint over the walls inside the arched doorway, at the left and right side of the opening, then opened up the shadows in just those regions, added a bit of clarity, and contrast. The result is at right.

Finally, because I’m a fan of black and white, and I thought this would look good as a monochrome image, I created a virtual copy, then went to Lightroom’s black and white panel and tweaked the red and orange saturation a bit until I was pleased with the look, right.

Could I have done all of this in some other software, such as Gimp (or Photoshop)? Of course! When the photo was first processed, I probably didn’t have the skills to do it with the tols I had. But it was much easier, and I had a lot more control over the process in Lightroom…

… and it is great to find that some of my earlier photos were actually worth keeping!