Saint Margaret’s Bay, Nova Scotia.

Peggy’s Cove is a small rural community located on the eastern shore of St. Margaret’s Bay in Nova Scotia, Canada. I shared my Travel Tuesday post about this picturesque community here, providing some background about Halifax and Peggy’s Cove. A chance scan of Peggy’s Cove’s original image folder while looking for a specific image reminded me that many unprocessed images in the folder deserved a second look.

On the day of our visit, there were tour buses galore and people aplenty. Indeed, several tours from the cruise port in Halifax include Peggy’s Cove as a stop. In addition to the cruise tours, Peggy’s Cove is an attraction for locals from Halifax and other cities and towns in the region. I chose not to include several images from the original post because of the crowds.

Reviewing many of the images captured at Peggy’s Cove, I decided to see if I could rescue some of the rejects by using the artificial intelligence (AI) available in the latest versions of Luminar Neo and Adobe Lightroom Classic, or by rethinking the compositions.

My opening photo, above, was initially rejected not because of any people in the shot but because of an unsightly foreground with chains and ropes that distracted from the subject. They were too close to the boat to crop them out of the photo, and when I initially processed the photo, I tried using the clone and erase tools to remove the distractions, but I wasn’t happy with the results. This attempt included a slightly tighter crop and Photoshop’s Generative Fill tool to clean up the area behind the boat.

There was always a gathering near the lighthouse. Even after a relatively tight crop, one of the least crowded photos I shared in my original post still included eleven people. I used Luminar Neo’s erase tool instead of the Gen-Erase AI tool to remove the people. The person in front of the door was the hardest to remove, as Neo didn’t recreate the door properly. A bit of cloning of the base of the lighthouse restored the door frame at the bottom.

In addition to the bagpiper shown in my earlier post, a gentleman took his turn playing an alpenhorn. Several people were standing to his right. Adobe Photoshop’s Generative Fill tool removed the people and their shadows, and provided three alternatives for what the rock structure beneath them looked like. I chose the one that appeared the most realistic to me, though they all would have worked.

A small boat that had seen better days rested near the launch ramp. I didn’t do any AI work on this image. When I wrote the original post, I didn’t include it in the group of images to process and use in the original story. I decided to include it here.

I included a version of this image in my original post, but I decided to rework it with a tighter crop. That simple change removed some extraneous foreground elements that I should have removed in my original edit.

Since learning how to create panoramic images from multiple photos using Lightroom Classic’s panorama stitching, Luminar Neo eventually added that trick to its add-in toolkit. For this post, I used Lightroom Classic’s tool to combine an image of Halifax’s skyline (that I didn’t publish earlier) with the St. George’s Island photo featured in the original post.

With today’s available editing tools, I could probably find many images I originally rejected that would qualify for a rework. Fortunately, I enjoy editing images almost as much as traveling to interesting places to capture them. I’ve added these images to my Flickr gallery from our visit to Peggy’s Cove here. All of the images there are viewable in 2K HD.

John Steiner