Playing With An Old File

The sun is still up but it's zero degrees and falling as I type this with wind chill in the minus 20s. Not weather for being out and about.

Back in 2015, as I was moving stored images around on portable hard drives, I accidentally deleted all the RAW images from my EOS 30D, 50D, 60D and 1D Mark III bodies. I still have all the processed JPG files I uploaded to Zenfolio but I lost all the original files. I occasionally like to go back and re-edit files as I get new software or stumble across a different processing technique.

But even with only a JPG file to work with there are ways to improve images. This photo was made with an EOS 50D and the EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro USM lens back in 2010.  It was shot at f/6.3 and 1/60th of a second at ISO 100 on a tripod.

The scene is looking South from Prospect Park in Troy down the Hudson River toward Albany. The just rising September sun was blocked by the hillside, resulting in a shadow in the foreground. The first image is a normally processed file bringing up the shadows as much as reasonable.

The second image results from reprocessing that JPG file in Canon's DPP software using the HDR tool. It's a much better overall scene, I think.