This week, Tina hosts the challenge called Live and Learn. She writes, “It’s often said that as we age it’s important to continue to maintain our social lives, to stay healthy both physically and mentally, and to challenge ourselves to learn new things.” You can read her entire challenge post here.

I learned about photography in the mid-1960s, and then promptly abandoned the pastime for a career. After I retired 40 years later, I decided to pick up a camera and share our traveling retirement. I had a lot to relearn given the changes in technology. For this challenge, I’m going to focus (pun intended) on post-processing, the skills I learned and continue to relearn with every new release of photo editing software. The image above was taken in 2007 with a digital point-and-shoot camera. I recently reprocessed it with Adobe Lightroom Classic and Luminar Neo. Below is the image as I processed it when I first published it on my blog in 2013.

At the time, I used Adobe Photoshop Elements for digital processing. I used a tight crop, but I wasn’t familiar enough with processing tools to deal with the blue colorcast that dominated the image.

What I learned: Neo’s Remove Colorcast tool to tone down the blue reflection on the ship from the water and the clouds. I also decided that the original photo, as taken, including the tender boat, gives the viewer a reference to the relative size of the ship.

In Rollag, Minnesota, a steam train provides rides for guests at the Western Minnesota Steam Threshers Reunion. This image is from 2015 and is a composite of three images in an exposure blend. Once I learned about the benefits of blending exposures in Adobe Lightroom Classic, I almost always bracketed my landscape photos with metering set to generate three exposures, one stop under, one stop over, and one stop “just right”.

What I learned: The significant advantage of exposure blending is that the underexposed image provides a more correct exposure for the bright sky, and the overexposed photo provides a more accurate exposure for the darker areas of the photo. If you look behind the engine’s wheel assembly in the blended photo, you can see there is much detail visible in the undercarriage of the train. I recently discovered that with my new Nikon Z7 II, I no longer need to exposure blend as the camera’s sensor has a much wider dynamic range. Unless I really want to photograph a scene with extreme dark and light areas, I no longer bracket my exposures. By 2015, I had learned another useful feature in Lightroom Classic: the vertical alignment tool in the Transform module, which I used to correct the backward lean of the train.

This photo caught an expression in the busker’s eyes; when I loaded the image into Lightroom Classic, I realized that he appeared to be deep in thought about something he saw, while still playing his guitar. The background of this image always bothered me, and I tried several different ways to make it look better.

What I learned: Luminar Neo has a tool to layer one image upon another. It seemed less complicated than what I’d read about when trying to use Photoshop. The tilt in the image was easy to correct, and I used a tighter crop to eliminate the clutter on the bench. My first effort was to use a mask to defocus the background. That worked quite well, but when I discovered a set of light leak backgrounds, I made a “sandwich” using Neo to add a background layer, mask around the subject, and then put another light leak over the image making sure to allow high percentage of transparency in the overlay and erasing the overlay around this face and upper part of his body and guitar.

One day, I stumbled upon a YouTube video showcasing Josh Adamski’s innovative technique, known as the Adamski Effect, which combines blurred backgrounds with sharply defined foreground elements. His technique often features elongated vertical or horizontal streaks, creating a dreamlike, painterly atmosphere.

What I learned: Luminar Neo’s background removal and layering tools made the process relatively easy to emulate. The process began by creating a working copy of the original image, cropping to make the subject larger, and removing the background from the subject, in this case, a lady examining shells on the beach.

From the YouTube Video, I learned to use Photoshop to blur the background. Going back to the original image in Neo, I made another copy of the original and then removed the subject. Then I sent the copy to Photoshop, where I used the Motion Blur filter and experimented with the pixel number in the filter to find a pleasing background effect. By using the angle setting, the lines created can be angled in any direction. Once I had a setting I liked, I used that blurred image as the background in Luminar Neo. I then loaded the subject (minus background) back into Neo as a layer. I added a slight shadow underneath by using a radial filter to subtly darken the sand underneath her. I could have done the entire project in Photoshop if I’d taken the time to learn how to create layers in that program. Since I processed this photo, Skylum Software has added a Blur function to Neo, offering both amount and angle controls for four types of blur, including Motion Blur. I no longer need to use Photoshop for this particular style of impressionistic photography.

One day, while browsing my Samsung S23U’s photo gallery, I stumbled upon the artistic filters provided with the Gallery app.

What I learned: I had virtually no work to do in creating this creative interpretation of a tour boat boarding tourists at St. Tropez, France.

Converting this photo inspired me to create a blog post showcasing several cell phone photos, each transformed with a handful of creative filters from the Gallery app. Of all the filters in the Gallery app, this artistic rendering tool is my favorite.

I’ve used Silver Efex since it was part of the collection of free tools. Color Efex Pro, Viveza, and Silver Efex Pro were widely praised for their creative filters and intuitive control point system. Silver Efex is my go-to program for black and white conversions, and I seldom do more than select from the list of presets to do the conversion.

What I learned: In experimenting with a photo of a fisherman returning to shore, I happened to pick a low-key preset. With an additional lowering of exposure, I thought it made a plausible moonlight photo (if you use your imagination).

The 2013 cruise with this stop in Mexico was the first time I started experimenting with bracketing exposures, and a handful of the 175 images captured on that cruise were bracketed. I processed them into exposure blends in Lightroom Classic. This photo was also a precursor to the day-to-night conversions I’ve been sharing lately. There is a historical element to day-to-night photography. Many of the early outdoor adventure shows on TV in the 1950s used the trick of lowering exposure in-camera to simulate nighttime when producers didn’t want to pay overtime for film crews and performers for actual night shooting.

That brings me to my concluding set, captured in Morlaix, France. This street scene was converted to night using techniques I learned from a YouTuber, Jamie Mathlin. He uses Photoshop and Lightroom Classic to create his day-to-night images. He has plenty of examples in his video series from which to learn. The photo features a historic church on the left and a viaduct built in 1865 that still services train traffic from Paris to Brest, on the coast in Britany.

What I learned: The photo includes a sky replacement, lots of exposure reduction, and selective exposure relighting using radial fills to “illuminate” the dark street. The process is quite time-consuming; this conversion took well over an hour, but I find the creative outlet to be something I can’t quit once I start.

My most recent learning experience is something I learned just this week. I was working with Lightroom Tech Support on an issue relating to importing photographs. In the process, the tech mentioned the Catalog menu. Usually, that menu is collapsed, and I don’t recall paying any attention to the tools in the menu. To search my galleries for potential shares to a challenge, I first search my Exports folder for images I’ve already processed. Then, I search my current working directory for possible shares. Finally, if necessary, I search my archives for unprocessed photos that could be potential images to process and share for the challenge.

What I learned in the support chat is that I can search “All Photographs” in the catalog once, rather than having to do multiple searches. I use either Excire Search or a keyword search to locate potential photos so I don’t have to search through the 130,000-plus images in the catalog. I’ve been using Lightroom Classic since version 5 in 2013. If I ever used the “All Photographs” choice, I don’t remember doing so. That discovery proves that when it comes to photography, we indeed “Live and Learn.”

Thanks to Tina for reminding us how we got to where we are in our photography journeys. While I enjoy the process of taking photos, especially of our travels, I can spend hours more improving and fixing the errors in the images I bring back home. For those who like to pixel-peep, check out metadata, or just view the pictures on a dark background, they are posted in my gallery on Flickr here.

Last week, Egidio brought us into the woods for some forest bathing. I enjoyed visiting all the lovely forests shared by everyone for the challenge. Next week, it’s my turn to host. My challenge post will go live on Saturday, August 2, at noon Eastern time in the United States. If you’d like to respond to the challenge on your own blog, but aren’t sure how to get started, check here.

John Steiner