Tarquinia redux

over the past day i have undertaken a little project, to which i alluded at the end of my last post. as most of you know, i spent a lot of time editing and tweaking my photos so that they looked their absolute best (sometimes even better than in real life). but the photos i took at Tarquinia and Cerveteri were the first ones that i seriously edited, and i didn't have the experience and skill that i had gained some 2000 photos later at the end of the semester. i tried to do some color and exposure correction on my photos from the tombe that were taken in low light without flash (because they had to be, since they were through glass). i did what i could with the limited tools of iPhoto. now i know that i could have done better, and thankfully i still have the original, unedited versions. i've gone back and re-edited some of them, with pretty good results. here is a sampling:

original

2006 edit

2007 edit

original 2006 edit 2007 edit

original 2006 edit 2007 edit

i must say i'm really pleased with these results. of course, not everything went perfect. i actually desaturated some of my photos when i edited them in 2006, because they had some nasty yellow hues to them. that resurfaces again in my new versions, but i like the greater saturation, even if it's a bit overblown at times.

and some were not salvageable at all. [warning, geeky photo editing stuff ahead, including histograms and whatnot.] the best results came from photos that were light but lacking contrast. photos that started out darker just couldn't be saved to a high standard of quality (usually they would look too red or orange). i found out that the reason for this was that those photos were severely underexposed in the blue range:

since the curve for blue was essentially off the dark end of the scale, there was insufficient color data to stretch across the whole spectrum and not make it look ugly. unfortunate, but i'll have to stick with my old edits of those photos.

so those are the results. you can view all 20 of the Tarquinia redux photos here.