Rework Wednesday – Petrified Pathway

Check out my latest feature – Rework Wednesday! This is where I take an old photo from my gallery and re-edit it. I have lots of unused, raw images waiting to become new works of art, but sometimes the previous images I’ve edited make me cringe over the way they look.

Anyone who knows me is familiar with my obsession with Adobe Photoshop – I love it and use it almost every day! The generative AI integration (Firefly) has been a real timesaver when it comes to removing random objects, but I still prefer to manually edit my images.

My skills have improved greatly over the last decade, which is awesome for my work going forward, but it’s also what makes those old photos look so cringey… “Ugh! I wish I’d known how to adjust/light/mask/tone better when I first edited this!”

One of my old photos has really been bugging me lately… a shot I took 10 years ago of a road curving through the hills of the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona. I can still remember how thrilling it felt to stand under the desert sun in the middle of that road with my old Nikon. I was much less thrilled when I saw how the picture turned out.

Back then, I spent a lot of time trying to make the image match what I’d seen with my own eyes. At the time, I was okay with how my edits turned out. But 10 years later, the picture looks so flat, oversaturated, and very unimpressive. (Seriously, what is that sky color even supposed to be?!)

I had to re-edit it!

I spent more time searching for the untouched copy of that image than I did actually re-editing it. And WOW! Comparing my Rework to my original edit killed the cringe! The second time around, I was able to edit it better and faster. SWEET! 

I’m so glad I did this because it showed me there’s no reason to look at my old stuff and berate my inexperience. I can literally see how much I’ve improved over the years, and that only encourages me to grow even more.