Editing Old Pictures

[olivermoss]

My life has been dealing with roughly 1,500 old concert photos and trying to wrangle them: delete duplicates, color correct, etc. I still have a few with red eye problems I can't seem to fix with Lightroom, online tools or anything else I've tried.

For some where the colors are just borked I wasn't sure what to do with them, but I finally found my other brain cell and remembered that if color is being a problem, you can just make the color go away. Going from color to B&W changes the composition a lot but adding vignetting hides a variety of sins.





This is actor/musician Christian Kane and his band. That's who I have take literally over a thousand pictures of. He has a habit of putting his hand over his heart and looking at the audience at the end of sets for a moment and I don't have a good picture of that. I usually don't shoot at that part of the show at all. Better pics at my website, but I am also really, really charmed by these and wanted to do something with them even though they are 'bad' photos from a technical POV. I physically put my camera away for large portions on concerts so I focus on being there and don't even think about getting shots.

So now I am making B&W version of some of the photo sets. It's saved a few images.

My current website gallery is here. I'll be adding a few more and also separating out galleries like this into a secondary Secret Menu for geeky stuff.

Comments

[mistressofmuses]

I love these black and white versions! I am very much a layperson when it comes to photography, but I definitely don't think they look like "bad" photos, even if they aren't technically perfect.

[olivermoss]

The color versions or trainwrecks, but I love the few pics I have of him doing that too much.

Switching to B&W and adding vignette is like adding cream and cheese to a failed pasta dish :) It hides all the sins.

[mistressofmuses]

Hey, knowing how to hide the sins and salvage the "recipe" is absolutely its own skill set!

[highlander_ii]

sepia can sometimes do similar - i've done the 'omg yuck -> b&w' trick too. XD

are these digital photos or were they done on film and digitized? i've had to fix old digitized film-based photos before and that can be a triiiiip.

[olivermoss]

These are jpeg versions of digital files. The original files are gone, but I found an old export. If I had the original files, 10x the data, that would be magic. But honestly the color correction and other things on most of them went pretty well. My old camera's color data was pretty boss for this to be possible. The lighting at Dante's was harsh, red gels on everything. When you are there, your eyes adjust. But the camera is just like 'you wanted these humans in primary colors, right?'

I am trying to under-correct to avoid over-correcting, but yeah, concert lighting is so rough!

[highlander_ii]

oof... lost files =(

and yes... concert/show lighting... much easier on digital than it was on film, but still - oooof

[olivermoss]

Someone I know deleted my hard drives on purpose. That whole era of my photography is gone. I thought all the show pictures were lost, but found some old export folders and then spent weeks dealing with them ... and then quickly backed everything up.

Yeah, a lot of concerts were shot on black & white film for reasons. If only all the people and lights would stop moving for a minute that's be great. Also could they nix the mikes and mike stands getting in the way of faces?

[highlander_ii]

so many ouch! i feel you - i'm p sure i have missing negatives somewhere (like, i think they're at my parents' house, but lord only knows where) for some convention photos that i wanted to digitize.

conventions are the same way - holding those mics in front of their faces, they move around all the time - so inconsiderate to us mere photographer types =)