I have decided to slowly import my image collection into Lightroom catalogs. I use one catalog per year. I may at one time decide to pull all those catalogs into one big catalog, but at the moment this seems to be a workable solution. 2012 is done, keywords applied to all images, and now I go back through 2011. I already have December and am now working on November.
It’s not only keywording though. I also find images that at the time didn’t make it into a post, often only because I lacked time. Here’s one of them, taken with the Olympus E-P2 and its kit lens, the 17/2.8 pancake.
It’s ISO 1600 and parts of the mannequin were pulled out of the shadow. Yes, there is noise, but if you ask me, the noise is pretty attractive. It’s a fine grain that does not take away from the overall impression at all. Feel free to look at bigger sizes on Flickr.
Again, this is not in any way comparable to what the OM-D can do (while it’s almost two stops better than the LX5), but the remarkable fact is, that Lightroom, correctly used, is as good as Photoshop CS3 + Topaz Denoise, and in some cases it is even better. Part of this is obviously the progress Adobe have made since Camera RAW 4.6. Color noise reduction is much better now and somehow coarse color noise is magically converted into fine-grained luminance noise. In a way the noise that’s left looks very much like the famous DxO noise. I am very satisfied.
This post is called “Untold Stories I” because I fully expect more of them. Cataloging, keywording and processing of old images take time, and that time is time that I don’t shoot. There is no way around though. I just have to do it, because I already have trouble finding images.
“Untold Stories” is from Sinead O’Connor’s 2005 album “Throw Down Your Arms”. You either love it or hate it, I for sure love it. Hear it on YouTube.