While this Photo Remix doesn’t follow the original rule of starting with a bad edit, the fourth entry in any series is usually when rules go out the window, so here we go!

This time I’m working with a photo from the archive that even I hadn’t seen before. I was shooting with friends in Asheville, NC, when this moment with this man singing loudly from his truck and blaring music as he drove by happened so fast, I didn’t have time to adjust my exposure from the previous scene. It was point, pray, press the shutter. I never gave the image a second look past the initial import thumbnail, assuming it was unrecoverable.

It wasn’t until recently, while browsing Immich (my self-hosted photo archive/backup tool), that I stumbled across it again. Immich applies its own DNG interpretation to RAW files, so what I saw was a lifted version of the exposure. The result was rough and noisy… but maybe there was something there. I’ll start with the straight-out-of-camera image that made me abandon the shot, then show the Immich preview I rediscovered in 2025, and finally the edits

Straight Out of Camera:

View fullsize

November 19th, 2011
Asheville, North Carolina
Canon EOS 5D Mark II
EF 50mm f1.4 USM
ƒ/1.4
1/5000 s
50 mm
ISO 100

Yikes!
Good luck perceiving an image there. At ISO 100 and 1/5000s, I was basically stress-testing my camera’s sensor.

Immich Preview:

View fullsize

The composition lined up with what I was aiming for 14 years ago, and focus wasn’t a total miss.
The driver’s face isn’t tack-sharp, but his open mouth/expression adds something.
The amount of noise in this preview is wild so expectations in Lightroom were low.

2025 Black and White Edit

View fullsize

Obviously, we’re starting with Black and White. 🩼
I corrected the horizon and cropped to remove the wasted space on the left of the frame, then lifted exposure by more than 3.5 stops - just enough to reach a still-dark but acceptably moody place. I’m fine with the crushed shadows in the defocused tree and the woman’s hair since they frame and almost trick your eye into looking past them and at the subject: the man in the truck. The highlight lines on the truck’s body and cab also help pull your eye straight to him. The tree cutting off the truck’s front breaks your brain’s object-recognition enough to create intrigue, while the woman’s out-of-focus tilted head adds an almost-triangular tension to the composition.

Modern editing software really flexes here; I don’t remember being able to pull this much shadow detail from 5D Mark II files back in 2011. Upping the exposure brought artifacting, but less than expected. The woman’s face outline almost glitches into rough pixelated lines, but I don’t hate it. 🙊 I did clone out a diamond-shaped patch of noise on her cheek that was too distracting, but left the pavement and truck paint artifacts in (skill issue? laziness?). Lightroom’s AI Denoise did some heavy lifting (duh): I masked the truck, lifted shadows sparingly, and enhanced highlights to give more shape. On the driver, I added clarity and contrast to pull more focus to his face.

The image is still a little rough around the edges, but I like how it turned out. Sure, digital noise lacks film’s softness, but nostalgia is cyclical - people are already romanticizing old digicams. Grain or glitch, maybe it all comes around?

2025 Color Edit

View fullsize

I love the colors, but this one only holds up at Instagram size. At larger scale, the artifacts on the truck and pavement drag it down.

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

September 5th, 2015
San Diego, California
Canon EOS 5D Mark II
Sigma 35mm f1.4 Art
ƒ/1.4
1/160 s
35 mm
ISO 50

Straight out of camera image
It’s a snapshot that isn’t technically good, particularly well-exposed, or even all that recoverable in post - but it’s still a photo I like. I can’t explain it. My lizard brain just takes over and it scratches an itch. It also happens to be a photo of someone I love, so yes, I’m probably biased.
I overexposed parts of the image to the point of almost no recovery. The photo is still usable as a snapshot, but I should have stopped down the aperture (and yeah, that seems to be a recurring theme in this Photo Remix series). I also could have nudged the shutter speed faster, because the waves aren’t tack sharp. The brightness nuked most of the color, leaving everything muted and muddy. The massive halo of clipped highlights in the sky is hard to ignore. Framing-wise, I should have dropped the horizon and given the subject’s body more breathing room. Oh, and I should’ve told Jeff that jean shorts were NOT back, even in 2015.

2015 Edit:
I don’t love the direction I went leaning into this cooler color, but I like how I went “full send it”and added more exposure just to try to highlight the subject and the ocean, sky be damned.
This image is a personal snapshot, so I was likely using a quick and dirty VSCOfilm preset (RIP) as I passed by it during the photo import process, but I wish I had spent a little more time on it because I recently saw this photo next to the straight out of camera image and thought…here’s another option for a Photo Remix.
I also didn’t straighten the horizon in this edit, probably because I felt straightening the horizon almost caused the subjects feet to be cut off? That’s the only rationale I can think of for the time.

2025 Edit:
With this image’s exposure being borked from the very beginning, the only redeeming quality is the texture provided by the ocean and the rocks I figured going black and white was my best chance for this redemption.
I applied a mask to Jeff and reduced the contrast on his body and clothes to make him stand out against the contrasty midground. I applied a mask to the sky and just brought the highlights down to a manageable level, then finally, I had a mask for the rocks and the water and brought down the clarity which gave the specular highlights on those areas a nice smeary texture. Then finally, I straightened that horizon line.

I did experiment with a color edit, but the I couldn’t find a version that I was happier with than the straight out of camera version.

The lesson here? Even when we get clinical about what makes a photo “good” or technically correct, sometimes we just find beauty in the imperfect. If I had shot this image in a “technically correct” manner, would it have had the same effect on me? This image just feels dreamy to me. It drags up a vague memory of a moment I may not even fully recall - but I’m glad this frame exists, even if it’s not perfect.

While my first Photo Remix focused on an edit where the edit was a litte heavy handed, I wanted to bring up a rare example of an image where I feel I may have under corrected.
The image below was captured in more of a street photography style than the first image, which was from a structured photo session. If I remember correctly, I walked up from behind this guy with his rat on his shoulder and snapped the photo from his side. We stopped and chatted and I got a few other images as well.

View fullsize

2012 Straight Out of Camera

View fullsize

2012 Edit

View fullsize

2025 Color Edit

View fullsize

October 27th, 2012
San Diego, California
Canon EOS 5D Mark II
Canon EF 35mm f/1.4L USM
ƒ/1.4
1/8000 s
35 mm
ISO 50

Straight out of camera image
My knee-jerk reaction? I still like the composition and subject placement just as much as I did the first time I saw it. There’s something about how it’s framed that feels intentional. The color’s actually pretty solid too, as long as said color wasn’t in shadow. Overall though, the image is way too dark. The exposure misses the mark, and the horizon line cuts awkwardly through the background. I think the main focus point is on the rat which means I missed focus on the mans’ eyes. Shooting wide open at f/1.4 used to be my default, because I was obsessed with bokeh. But it cost me here. If I had shot this at f/3.2 or even f/4, I could’ve nailed both the man’s face and the rat in sharp focus while still keeping the dreamy separation I wanted. And with that kind of aperture, I could’ve gotten away with a slower shutter speed even in bright sunlight. Lesson learned.

2012 Edit:
With this early edit, I didn’t totally lift the shadows—there’s still some tonal depth to work with, which I like. And the colors stay fairly true to the original scene, but it may be too dark. Or just flat. The shadows are leaning into this weird blue cast that doesn’t add anything and actually makes the image feel colder and less inviting.

2025 Color Edit:
I was able to recover way more shadow detail than ever before, and while the horizon line still isn’t perfect, I did manage to improve it slightly by leveling the horizon. But that fix came at a cost - the crop changed slightly and the framing is a little tighter. You lose all context of the man holding an electric razor in his hand in the new edit, but to be fair, it was barely perceptible in the original crop. The colors are great, and I think I found a nice mix of letting the shadows be brightened but still keeping contrast in the tone and colors of the photo. I also think bringing in the shadows up the man’s face shows a bit of sadness in his eyes I haven’t seen before in any of the other edits.

Bonus 2025 Black and White Edit:
This black and white version simplifies the composition in a way that really tightens up the image. All of the textures and contrasty parts of the image being on the subject of the rat and the man allows for the most focused edit yet. The downside to black and white? You lose the context of the water in the background, which might be a meaningful loss… or maybe it doesn’t matter at all.

What’s your preference of these 4 images above?

Tastes Change.

I’ve made editing decisions in the past that didn’t age well. At the time, they felt like solid choices, but after a very long time editing photos, you start to see what makes an image truly timeless… and what was just a filter fad or a phase.

I recently got organized and finally pulled together all my scattered hard drives and consolidated every image I had ever taken, both smartphone and digital camera images alike, and combined them into one safely backed-up, chronological archive that I can access from anywhere. It’s the first time I’ve had a complete view of everything photography in one place.

Having this kind of access has let me revisit old RAW files I hadn’t seen in years, alongside the original JPEG edits I once considered “final.”

My perspectives and tastes have changed so I wanted to give a more experienced set of eyes an opportunity to look at the images that took them, and see if my original edit and even the original image, still hold up.
So I decided to run a fun little challenge for myself - a Photo Remix.

I’m taking an image from the archive that I feel I did dirty in the original edit and I’ll give a fresh edit that more align to my taste and style today. I also want to discuss what I could have done differently on the technical side, albeit exposure, framing, etc.
I have 3 versions of the same image.

1. The straight out of camera JPEG from the RAW file.

2. The original color edit from 2011.

3. A fresh color edit from 2025.
   

I’ll break down what works, what doesn’t, and what (in hindsight) I should have done differently.

View fullsize

Straight out of Camera

View fullsize

2011 Edit

View fullsize

2025 Edit

July 1st, 2025
Kingsport, Tennessee
Canon Canon EOS 5D Mark II
Canon EF 135mm f/2L USM
ƒ/2
1/200 s
135 mm
ISO 50

Straight Out of Camera Image:
The original straight out of camera image definitely had some magic going for it. The lighting was excellent, and the bokeh? Dreamy. That halo effect from the sun catching the couples hair gave it a sort of cinematic glow. I think the colors skew a little green overall, but it’s a good starting point. The composition is good, not great. I should have included more of the tree they were leaning against to the left of the frame, to not only give context, but also kill some of the slightly dead space to the right of the frame. The sky had some clipped highlights that pulled focus in the wrong ways, and their body language? Love the embrace and the kiss, but his right hand placement gives hover hand. Don’t worry, my guy, I’ve been there too.

2011 Edit:
I mean, it’s a 2011 vibe? I flattened the dynamic range and lost most of the shadows on the couples faces. Throw in a pretty bright background and midground and the image just looks fake and flat. For what little shadows that are left, I turned purple. I’m also not sure why I thought that shade of sickly green was okay for the grass when the original image had such better colors. I might have taken the original image in the higher key edit style because I wanted to reduce, what I found to be at the time, distracting shadows or the slight red hue because of the sunlight reflecting from her skin.

2025 Color Edit:
In the latest edit I kept the natural dynamic range of the original image by reworking the lighting with the goal of preserving the shadows on the couple’s faces, and embracing that reddish hue that can appear on lighter skin tones when sunlight reflects off it. Since this warm tone on his nose and forehead, and on her shoulder and hair, is one of the few places that color appears in the photo, I think it immediately draws your eye to the focal point: the couple. I also shifted the grass toward a more yellow-gold tone and generally leaned into a much warmer overall palette than the original edit. At the same time, I tried to tame some of the distracting “glowiness” in the foreground grass by dialing back the saturation considerably. I think this results in a much more pleasant to view image than the first edit, as it brings it the colors closer to realism and isn’t so “heavy” of an edit.