Above is the unmodified original of the view of Ludlow that I posted yesterday. It has become a completely different picture because of the work I did. I don’t think my altered version has become the jewel in the crown of my portfolio but it has moved on from the snapshot appearance of what came out of the camera.

An obvious difference is the colour, enhanced with the velvia effect I was writing about. I have also made other decisions that contributed to the final result. The image has been rotated so that the church tower, the dominant vertical element, stands upright. I have cropped it to a 16:9 ratio, making the tower relatively larger in the frame and also dividing the image into three horizontal bands – sky, town and trees – that each fill about a third of the space. I even did a little bit of cloning to remove a cluster of leaves from the top of the ash tree on the left, which were awkwardly truncated by the cropping.

Lots of decisions but relatively little work for major improvements – that is the joy of the digital darkroom.

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