I’m in the middle of putting some themed Blurb books together and went for a rummage round the darker recesses of my Lightroom catalogue. Lightroom is a great piece of software and I now tend to do much of my photo editing on it (apart form mono conversions and multi layer work), and it’s a vastly quicker and smoother workflow than cataloguing images in the clunky Adobe Bridge, editing the raw files individually in Adobe Camera Raw, and then Photoshop. As I’ve got more into Lightroom, I’ve begun to get my head round it’s capabilities, while the raw processing abilities of the software improves with each release. Black and white conversions are still done in the Nik Silver Efex Pro plugin in Photoshop though.

In re-visitng these images, the main changes were – lens corrections, cropping, tonal/curves adjustments, and monochrome conversions.

These images were taken at Old Lane Mill in Halifax, and were ones that at the time I thought had potential, but once I viewed them on-screen, could no longer see it.

This has been quite heavily cropped and straightened up, definitely works better in monochrome. The crop has removed a lot of the extraneous aesthetic distractions, such as the ground, the silver pipe on the ground floor and the fire escape. The monochrome conversion has removed the distraction of colour.

Now this one was one that at the time I thought would be a good idea, but couldn’t figure out how as the buildings in the background were just too far away. There wasn’t enough room behind me to get far enough back to use a telephoto that would have compressed the perspective slightly.

This is marginally better. The biggest improvement has been the increase in the contrast in the stonework, but unfortunately that’s it really. It was worth a go I suppose.

And for completeness, a couple from Fernhurst Mill. These are relatively recent images, so the edits were less radical.

 

Only a slight tweak here to the verticals, and the monochrome conversion was more for completeness so that it fell in line with the rest of the set.

As this was taken on the wide end of a 16-35, the converging verticals were noticeable. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much ‘headroom’ above the mill once corrected although I guess this could be cloned in if I extended the canvas in Photoshop.

The monochrome conversion is more effective inasmuch as it seems to draw attention to the fact that demolition is iminent – the digger in the foreground is the first thing you see, then the mill and you start to understand the link between the two.