Reediting Old Photos with Luminar

So, recently I’ve had several things happen that all came to looking through hundreds of old photos that I took (or at least was on my camera roll) when I started getting into photography. First, I found a plethora of disk backups I thought were lost, some of which had RAW files of photos I took over ten years ago. I backed all of these up on my external and kind of forgot about them. Next, I had a heart attack…yes, at 36 years old. I’m fine, just recovering. So, I have some time on my hands from not being able to work. Lastly, Humble Bundle (www.humblebundle.com) has a photo editing bundle up right now with Luminar 4. It looked like an interesting program, so I got it. I wanted to play around with it so I chose to go back through old photos to see if I can edit them better than I did years ago when I took them. I have the RAW files in a separate folder then my old portfolios that the old edits are in, so I did not refer to the previous edits while I was reediting them. Here are some comparisons:

I don’t know why I thought this was a good edit, though it was on my portfolio for a hot minute.

Here is the edit from today. So much warmer. Keeping her skin tones but still making the surrounding interesting and not blown out.

I didn’t take this photo, my wife did of her late mother. I sure loved contrast when editing.

Greens are lush. Skin tones are okay. Grass is actually green…and she is missed.

I don’t mind this edit all too much. Yes, it’s a little dark, but kept the detail in it and it captures a mood.

I chose to reedit this in B&W not knowing that I did B&W last time almost 10 years ago. It’s a lighter edit. but I can’t say which one is better. These are of my late step father. Times change.

Same as before; I seemed to have loved high contrast, blown out edits.

Eyes are still too dark, but that’s just because I didn’t have an eye light. It’s good to see where you came from and the progress that you made. I did my father’s shinny head justice.

It’s fine. A little dull, even though the contrast is through the roof…and dark, but fine.

Grass pops. Nothing is blown out, and added a cloud to the empty void that was the right side of the sky…

Those last two are old photos of my wife and she is going to kill me. She won’t agree with me, but she was beautiful then, and she’s beautiful now.

Well, I think I proved that, one, my eye for what an edit needs has improved, and two, Luminar 4 is pretty awesome. I could have done these edits (and would have been very close to what came out) in Lightroom, but it would have taken me way longer. I’ll still be using Lightroom for some things, but Luminar was a good investment.