Go to your archives and re-edit old photos with updated Lightroom

by Stanley LearyPhotography
First Day of school for Chelle at the new house. First time riding the bus to school and starting middle school today at Elkins Pointe on August 23, 2010. [Nikon D3, Nikkor 24-120mm ƒ/3.5-5.6, ISO 6400, ƒ/5.3, 1/160]

Your old photos can look even better today due to technological advances. I returned to this photo of my daughter’s first day of school ten years ago to re-edit the image in the latest version of Adobe Lightroom.

Original Edit in 2010.

You may like the earlier edit, but there are more possibilities with a few changes in Lightroom. First, they did a significant overhaul of the main engine in the software and then added new tools like Dehaze.

Today you can pick a color profile and use Dehaze; that was not an option in 2010.

Another control implemented in 2010 was Lens Correction improving all lenses by correcting for their imperfections.

[Nikon D3, Nikkor 24-120mm ƒ/3.5-5.6, ISO 200, ƒ/3.5, 1/125]

Back in 2010, I didn’t even try to edit this photo. With the dehaze control, I could make the background much more accessible than doing this in 2010 would have required.

TIPS

Shoot RAW – you have more information to work with before exporting a JPEG in Lightroom.
Folder for a RAW and separate folder for JPEG – I ingest and put all my RAW files into a folder, and then when I finish editing and exporting, I put those in a different folder JPEG
Archive all photos – Keep the RAW images and your JPEG images. You can later return to these photos and discover some gems due to the software improvements in the future.