In photography, as with most other pursuits, a thirst for knowledge will help keep your skills honed and your interest piqued. To that end, I’ve been on a mission lately to get serious about knocking off the cobwebs and really using my post-processing tools tho their fullest. Today I was reading Piet Van Den Eynde’s Dodge & Burn from Craft & Vision and after spending some time digging a little deeper into the Develop module I decided to revisit some earlier pictures.

On my recent trip to Savannah there were several shots that were pretty much blown. When they happened I was really more in snapshot mode and didn’t pay attention to how the camera was set. In one case the scene was incredibly overexposed and in then the pendulum swung the opposite direction leaving me with an image so dark that the scene was barely visible.

Here is the result of just a few minutes worth of work.

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I hate to admit that the image took quite a bit of work. I boosted the exposure more than I’d ever like to. Heck, I boosted just about everything. I also played around with dodging and burning the soldier’s jacket and threw in a vignette to draw the viewer’s eye to him. In a perfect world I would’ve framed it a little better but my position and the 70-200 didn’t give me the opportunity.

All in all the fact that this image was shot RAW and Lightroom gives you some cool tools it was possible to take something that I normally would’ve thrown away and turned it into a reasonably usable image. I won’t be blowing it up for a magazine cover shot or anything but it’s perfectly usable for most of my needs.

If you have images sitting in your catalog that you haven’t felt are worth the time and effort do yourself a favor and spend a few minutes trying to salvage them. You may be surprised at the results.