“It’s Always Better the Second Time!”

Long ago in a far-off land, I managed to delete all my Actions. I was on the road and I didn’t have a backup of them with me (that changed instantly) and I had to get images out to a client. I reached out to my dear friend Peter Bauer and asked if those actions might be anyplace else on my computer to which he said, “It’s always better the second time!” In other words, start recording because they are lost and I need to recreate them. Well as you might imagine knowing me, I took that simple statement to mean a whole lot more.

I finish my aviation photos in Photoshop permitting me to bring a bigger story to light, literally. As ACR & Photoshop evolve, in some cases so do my aviation photographs. Here’s a prime example. I literally finished this photo a decade ago which is what you see in the “before” image. I then revisited it today using today’s tool in ACR and Photoshop. Using ACR, I brought more life to the Corsair and in Photoshop I ran Nik Detail Extractor on the clouds in the background. It took seconds to do and it brought life to an old images.

You can do the same thing and if you need ideas, I have a few for you. You can head to KelbyOne to my class Aviation Photography: Post-Processing. The concepts are the same but the tools have vastly improved. You have nothing to loose and you might just find it’s always better the second time!