First things first…
Firstly, Happy 2019 and thank you for checking out my little corner of the internet. Hope your year is off to an amazing start!
As with every year, things become a bit reflective for me as the new year beckons. In 2018, it meant re-committing to make photography a focus in 2019 after ignoring it for the better part of the year gone.
It also meant updating this site and getting some new software. The importance of the latter was lost on me until I started playing around with some images that you would’ve seen on my social media.
It also meant updating this site and getting some new software…
The shiny new toy
Luminar by Skylum was my newest photography app of choice ever since I found editing with Lightroom to be getting slower and slower. In the past, I jumped between Photoshop and Lightroom quite a bit to get my images to a point where I was happy: Photoshop to clean it up and Lightroom to colour grade and organise the image. This worked quite well but I kept taking the PSD, editing in Lightroom and then jumping back and forth to tweak little things that I wish Lightroom could’ve done.
Enter Luminar, a fairly feature rich photo editor that seems to do just that. As of the time of writing, Luminar doesn’t (yet) organise photos, so that’s something Lightroom does very well. However, where Luminar really shines is being able to apply the basic edits and colour grading that Lightroom can do as well adding some pretty advanced filters to the image. It supports layers and masking as well which allows for some complex edits.
The result has been that I’ve spent less time bouncing back and forth and have had more time to get through the backlog of images from 4 trips ago! Here’s some subtle editing examples. I essentially started with the original files from months ago and got to a similar place of edit (or further along than before) in about half the time…
Old edit 
New edit 
New edit 
Old edit 
Old Edit 
New Edit
I’m probably a bit biased here, but I do like the new edits of these older images. What do you think? Part of this is also that as time goes on, your abilities as an editor and your taste also changes. There are things that I couldn’t do before with a photo that I can do now and I also like a slightly different look from before…
In any case, if you’re interested in Luminar, feel free to use my affiliate code RAFFY to get $10 off their price.
Nostalgia and maybe more re-edits?
All of this reflecting and re-editing did induce a decent amount of nostalgia: I really enjoyed the short trip down memory lane even if it was of a trip not even 1.5 years ago. Re-editing brought me back to the moment where I was taking the photos and thinking about what I wanted out of the final pictures.
Considering I am happier with my re-edits, I may take some time and go back to some of the old photos of mine and try to show them in a new light. Don’t worry, I’m not going to just keep posting the same old stuff with a slightly different edit! However, you may find that some photos look a bit different in the new gallery than what you may remember…
However, you may find that some photos look a bit different in the new gallery than what you may remember…
