I thought I’d try something a little different tonight and revisit an old file — one that I didn’t really consider a keeper before — and see what I could do with it. I went back to the first international trip I made after switching to digital. It was a trip to Greece in 2003.

It’s not that I hadn’t shot digital at all before this, but Greece was the first trip I made with only a DSLR and no film body. I was shooting RAW with a Nikon D100 and this particular image was made with a Nikkor 17-35 at 17mm.

I’d never made a serious attempt to post-process this shot because it had a huge contrast range that made keeping the church tower from blowing out while holding the detail in the shadows very difficult. This evening I made two versions in ACR, one exposed for the highlights and one for the shadows. I put the highlight image on a layer above the shadow image and painted in a mask using a Wacom tablet to let the shadow detail come through. Throw in a few smart filters and there you go. Not perfect but not bad for a few minutes work.

Could I have done this with the software that was available back in 2003? Probably. But I’m pretty sure it would have taken me a lot longer. It’s pretty great having old RAW files around knowing that, as the software progresses (and hopefully my skill level as well) I can go back and reinterpret images to get better or at least different results.