Image enhancement has always played a huge & necessary role in my work. Many, many years ago when I used to print my photos in my b&w and color chemistry darkroom I was always working on enhancing the final print – from dodging and burning to masking using cut sheets of paper to adjusting the settings on the color enlargement head – anything was fair game in getting the results I wanted.

"Entwinement"

The same holds true in my digital darkroom. Look at the above photo, titled “Entwinement”. It is a new photo from my Contemporary Collection. What is remarkable is how poor that photo looked originally, straight out out the camera, with no adjustments made. You can see below how pale and lifeless the original photo was.

The original RAW file was processed in Lightroom with all of the settings and changes I made reset, showing you the way the camera saw the scene.

By shooting RAW I was able to, starting in Lightroom, find many of the hidden colors, textures and details that were part of my vision when I originally photographed it. All that texture, color and feeling was there somewhere in the original file – I just had to spend the time searching for and bringing it all out.

For me the image enhancement does not end with Lightroom. After I get the file adjusted and in the ballpark of my original vision, the file is then brought into Photoshop to complete the transformation. Sometimes the final results are not that far from the original, straight-out-of-the-camera file. Most of the time, however, it is. “Entwinement” was a particularly dramatic difference – many files are not that extreme.

Close-up of the detail in "Entwinement".

My goal has never been to show you what the camera saw and recorded. The camera is just a mechanical device, devoid of all emotion & feeling, lacking in color & intensity. My goal is to share with you my vision – a vision that comes from a living, breathing person – not a cold, plastic & metal box.

I love working in my digital darkroom just as much as photographing behind the camera. I get just as excited watching a new print slowly come out of the printer as I did watching a print come to life in the developer tray of a chemistry darkroom.

The excitement, of course, is due to seeing the final representation of my vision that started by tripping the shutter on a camera, grew in the enhancement & processing in the digital darkroom, and came alive after the printer finished laying down it’s last drops of ink.