This was from our very first cruise all the way back in 2008 aboard Diamond Princess in Asia for our honeymoon and it was taken on one of the last sea days of the fabulous experience. I didn’t really take very many photos of the ship at all which can be explained by a lack of mobile phones with good cameras on them and me only having a 50mm prime lens on my DSLR at the time with the photography hobby being very new. I did pick up a Tokina wide angle lens in Hong Kong during the cruise and this shot was using it and getting more of the ship in view. But because it was late in the cruise all the excitement and strangeness of being on a ship for the first time had eased away into wonderful relaxation aboard and things like photos and videos of ships just wasn’t a thing back then. Oh for a time machine.

The photo now is a lot brighter and sharper, with a lot of the noise colour noise removed and some brightening of the shadows to just pick out what’s going on under the covers. A pale wash to both lighten the yellows and make the water in the pool pop has been added and the curves have been stretched to bring out more contrast.

A hazard of taking photos from bus windows is that they are prone to colour tint problems, dirt issues, motion blur, and reflections from inside the bus or from windows on the opposite side. The last of these was the issue with the original photo here but this picture makes use of the Camera Raw algorithm for reflection removal and the result works very well. Other than that, just a little bit of sensor dust removal, some noise reduction, and a bit of a boost in colour and brightness finish off the adjustments to the original shot.

The original photo was decidedly flat and rather dull, suffering from a lack of exposure caused by the variation in light between the sky at the end of the street and the shadowed street itself. For this rework the image has been sharpened, had contrast added, and had the colour boosted. Acid treatment to enhance some of the greens and reds in particular has been overlaid with low opacity just to get a little more depth into all the elements. The detail in the clouds has been brought out a bit and the overall colour temperature has been brought up a little too.

You can read about our visit to the Summer Palace and compare this to the original photograph here: Summer Palace, Beijing.

The original photo was taken in horrible lighting conditions. There was low, hazy cloud over Beijing at the time and the time of day was whiting out most pictures. The range of the resulting shot was not good so that has been widened to darken the colours and increase the contrast, then the saturation has been pushed up a long way to get some colour into the initial pale, bright photo. Sharpening was added for texture but the sky was still a bit of a blank spot above the main focal point so I replaced it with one of Photoshop’s default ones then reduced the opacity of it to look less jarring and warmed up the overall tone of the resulting image to accentuate the pleasing evening feel.

This is not to say that Blackpool didn’t have some nice elements. It’s by the sea, and we like the sea. This photo’s taken from along the pier, and we like piers. We went up the famous tower and into the ballroom, and had a lovely time there.

It’s just Blackpool itself. It was awful. We like faded glory to an extent. It felt more like faded misery.

The original photo on that post was a highly-processed one, and not the sort of thing I typically post in travel write-ups these days. This is more of a conventional edit with simple adjustments for the lens distortion and straightening, removal of sensor dirt, then reduction of noise from the older camera. Exposure corrected and shadows brightened for detail, then a little bit of saturation boost to make it slightly less dreary.

The bulk of Portsmouth sits on Portsea Island, a very flat island not very high above sea level – our house near the centre of the island is at probably one of the highest points and would gain beachfront views if the sea levels rose a handful of metres – and generally suffers from a lack of natural drainage as a result. Between 1865 and 1904 Colonel John Frederick Crease and Sir Frederick Bramwell oversaw construction of the pumping engine houses that would help the gravity-fed drainage system pull sewage into holding locations until such time as it could be ejected with the tide. The engines were officially switched on in 1887 and were still kept operational as backups until as late as 1954. Following restoration work the engine houses at Eastney were opened as museums in 1972.

If you like the steampunk vibe then you’ll enjoy any visit where Victorian era engineering is on show and Eastney Beam Engine didn’t disappoint here at all. Seeing the machinery in operation was mesmerising given the smoothness of the operation and generally quiet pumping taking place.

At some point after this visit I did some pseudo-HDR photo processing of a couple of pictures inside the Eastney Beam Engine House, likely at the time to share them on Google+ at the time. They’re below, and they were done with some fairly basic faked exposure variations in monochrome tones stacked on top of one another.

Only very minor tweaking for this photo rework. This is a crop of the original photograph to take away some of the left side of the bay. More texture detail has been pulled out and the contrast range extended with additional saturation of blues to move the sky away from its weak white colour.

The processing for this photo is simply my old, tried-and-tested, pseudo-HDR exposure stacking technique. Take the original photo, make it black and white, save it. Then adjust that photo’s exposure both up and down, tweaking the shadows and highlights to avoid clipping, and save those. Then let Photomatix work its magic with a tone-mapped combination of the stacked pictures and play around with the settings until there’s something that looks good. It’s a process that takes, at most, three minutes, once you’ve got the hang of it, and the results are sometimes lovely. To me.

This photo was taken at the end of a day’s excursion in Buenos Aires back in 2016, on the way back from La Boca heading towards Puerto Madero. That suggests this scene was photographed in one of those two barrios but I don’t recall the route well enough to be absolutely certain. I like the general run-down look of buildings covered in graffiti, especially when the underlying architecture hints at former days of glory.

The main bit of reworking on this picture was to play around with the perspective as the view was more slanted, straightening the wall and bringing some of the rightmost portions of the photo forward a bit to level out the pavement a little. In addition, some texture and clarity was increased to bring a little more contrast into the darker, grimier sections, and, finally, a light urban acid treatment was overlaid to cool the colours down a bit.

This was towards the end of that fantastic cruise experience, sailing between Vietnam and Singapore, and the day had been bright, hot, and humid right up until this huge storm cloud swept in over the sea and proceeded to throw it down. The rain didn’t last long, but it was heavy enough to send everyone scampering for cover.

A little bit of work on the shadows and highlights was applied to this photograph, as well as some use of increased texture and clarity to bring out some of the detail. The primary bit of rework on this picture of a storm at sea, though, was to see how well the new “AI” (I hate that deliberately misleading term with a passion) Denoise function in Camera RAW worked since the original photo was taken on my first DSLR camera and there was a lot of colour noise in the shot as the light of the day had suddenly vanished under the thick cloud. I have to say, a pretty good job actually. I wouldn’t want to use it on face details, but for something like this then it did a good job at cleaning up without obliterating or obviously fabricating elements.