Many younger folks have no idea how good they have it today, with the modern digital camera.  In the infamous “good old film days” you had little control of the quality of your image captures, and, if there was something wrong, such as a setting you didn’t notice, for example, you did not find out about it until the film was processed, and it was WAY TOO LATE to take another, better photo.

For whatever reason, many of my old film images are low contrast and seem fairly bland.  Fortunately, with modern post processing tools, we are able to extract and reconstruct the image fairly close to what it actually looked like to the naked eye.

In this case, the original photo was quite drab, as you can see here.  There is almost no detail in the deep shadow on the bottom right, and the colors are fairly drab for a sunset.  This is NOT what it looked like, believe me!  I would NEVER take a picture of something this bleak!  Rather, it looked much closer to the finished product above.  I used Macphun’s incredible imaging software titled Luminar, plus some minor “darken layer” work in Photoshop to remove some halos along the trees on the ridge.

I hope you enjoy the view as much as I did!  This was captured in 2000 – well before the forest fires in Yosemite Valley, using Kodak Gold film.  The film negative was scanned on a Kodak PhotoCD workstation, and extracted from the now extinct disc format using a Macintosh program called pcdMagic.