11-22mm Lens, Canon 50D, Cee's Black & White Photo Challenge, Instagram, Photo Challenges, Photo Editing, Photography, Picfair, What I Am Working On

What I Am Working On: How to Lose My Work

I think I am going to file this too: never do this again.

It all started out well enough, I was looking at this file, taken at Hadrian’s Wall:

ISO 800 22mm f/14 1/800sec

It’s nice but needs a bit of work. So, from that I created this version:

ISO 800 22mm f/14 1/800sec

Before dealing with the exposure, I applied a crop. I’ve used the rule of thirds overlay for this because, as I suspected, there was a stronger composition lurking within the original file. Then I considered the exposure; this image was created using the shadows slider to lighten the shadows, then I moved the black and white sliders around until the image looked good to me. I sharpened the photo by increasing the details sliders just a bit.

Then I created this black and white version:

ISO 800 22mm f/14 1/800sec

That is now lost for all time. I state in a very dramatic fashion.  Here’s what I did wrong. After making this version and saving off a blog-sized copy, I went back in the history to the color version and did the steps to add a watermark. I saved off my blog-sized copy of that. Then when I dropped the history tab again to go back to the black and white version, all that history was gone.

Two things, somehow that seems like that shouldn’t have happened and at the same time, I feel like I should have known that would happen. So yes, I should have saved a full-size version of that black and white prior to mucking about in the history. In Luminar, the way I am doing that (when I am doing things properly) is to export it to my hard drive labeled as a version. In my formatting on my drive, this version would have been: file number + Lum + BW.

Instead, I have just a smaller, blog version. So, I am writing this cautionary blog post to remind myself to do it differently next time.

What do you think of my color version versus the black and white? I have to say that I personally prefer the color, in my opinion, there is a bit of something that just didn’t translate into the black and white. Feel free to leave a comment below.

My Instagram version is here:

Cheers!

Color version is on Picfair.

Added to Cee’s Black and White Challenge, Fences and Gates.

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26 thoughts on “What I Am Working On: How to Lose My Work”

  4. I think both the colour and black and white have their own characteristics. The black and white version somehow, for me, articulates more clearly the ancient and age aspect of the wall. Lovely image. I’ve visited the wall and found it to be both mysterious and fascinating.

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  9. Oh dear, that sounds familiar! I have lost a lot of files during the years, totally unbeknown to me at the times when I saved images for our blog. It wasn’t until a couple of years ago that I learned the way to go with a file for the raws, one for the processed, one for the cropped – and still it’s easy to make a mistake, even just by moving a file in LR. I’m still not there yet with the individual tags to the images, it takes ages to complete …
    As for the photos, I prefer the one in colour. It’s a great place to be, we have fond memories of hiking along Hadrian’s wall.

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    • Sounds like you have developed a solid system though and that is really important. I’m at a bit of a vulnerable spot at the moment because I am switching editing software, there is always a learning curve with that, including on how to best save your work.
      We also enjoyed our time at Hadrian’s Wall and had really nice weather while we were there.

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  10. I’ve done it too.  I saved only the small resized image that went into a post, then realized later that I wanted the large image for something else.  Computer programmers often made a similar mistake in ancient times: they discarded the source code after the “last” translation (from a relatively readable programming language to machine code) of the “final” version of a program.  There was even a flurry of research into translating backwards, from machine level to source level.  People soon realized that “Save the source code!” should just be carved in stone.

    Glad U lightened the dark foreground.  Sometimes it takes a lot of editing to make a photo look the way a contrasty scene looked to the human eye.

    As usual, I prefer color to grayscale.

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