Jeff Damron Delivers...: Now in Living Color

That's "colour" for those of you who read English rather than American.

This is a sampling of pictures that I've previously posted online in black and white, often quite heavily manipulated in Nik Silver Efex Pro 2, now worked up with a lighter touch to more naturalistic color photos. Sometimes this works out to a cheerier result than the black and white did. Sometimes not so much. The great thing about shooting RAW rather than JPEGs is that you capture all the information so there is plenty go to back and worth with later, allowing unlimited interpretation of a picture. When I took these shots, dramatic black and white seemed clearly the way to go to me. Today, a more natural look that preserves the colors strikes me as at least as interesting as the old black and white versions.

Now, when I say the aim was a more "naturalistic" look, I mean that I didn't want the work I did on these to be obvious. But some of these have had a lot of tweaks, but all in Lightroom and all more or less things I would have done to my black and white pictures in the darkroom in the old days - controlling contrast and dodging and burning - all aimed at getting sufficient sharpness and clarity and saturation without going overboard, and all aimed at retaining some detail in both shadows and highlights. I did correct some perspective problems on buildings in order to get them to look straight - one of the great strengths of digital is the ability to bend the rules of physics at will to bring pictures more in line with the way our eyes and brains interpreted a scene rather than the way our lenses recorded it.