Cauldrons (Before & After)

For this weeks Before & After series I went back to my images from 2008. I found there this image of two cauldrons for cheese making. I took it when we visited Swiss Historical Village museum in New Glarus, Wisconsin. This image was never published on blog before, and probably the reason for it is that my eye for images changed over the years. I am more into simple scenes with object now. That is especially true for HDR images, but sometimes just adding extra contrats does the trick. Also, just looking at it today, I immediately spotted the white cloth and recognized it as an elelment adding interest to the frame.

I started the post-processing from cropping out the most distracting and unnecessary fragments – the pots at the top and the window on the right side. Then, I started to add contrast with both Contrast and Clarity sliders, working on overall exposure with Recovery and Fill Light at the same time. I had problems with making the front cauldron pop, so I tried the Black & White conversion. It worked like a charm, so I continued with Local Adjustment on this version. I am really excited to see, how I recently look at a photograph longer and try to spot the places to touch up with Local Adjustment Brush. I would turn on and off Before and After option in Lightroom (hint- “\” keyboard shortcut in Lightroom) and see how the images comes to life with each strike.

At the end of this post-processing, I removed four elements which I thought where distracting. Like in the game of finding the differences between two images, can you spot what I removed, using the Content-Aware Fill? (Don’t forget that you can click on both images to see full size versions)