Checking in with my review of 2021

[Rufus]

Happy New year to all at CiC and thank you all for holding the fort over the last year! I have enjoyed keeping up with the posts here.

After my hiatus of moving home and refurbishing it during Covid restrictions and near lockdowns, I am at last coming back up for air and this is my review of 2021 and a look forward to 2022.

Splashback image
I have posted very little of late. Some of you may recall one thread regarding the splashback for our kitchen. I took an Adobe stock image, quadrupled its size with Super Resolution, extended the image and had it printed onto glass. I am not sure how it was applied to the glass, but I am pretty sure it was not literally printed onto the glass; more likely it was printed onto a film that is adhered to the glass.

Before committing to the cost and timescales of the final product, I ordered a 2.5m / 8ft long test print first. That proved satisfactory, and it also proved handy as we ended up taping it in place while we waited for the finishing touches to the kitchen, including the splashback!

As a reminder, this was the image:



And, here is the final image printed onto glass and installed in the kitchen. The image is more washed out than in real life but hopefully it gives you an impression of the context of the final result:



Syncing Lightroom
I took a lot of shots on my phone to record progress made during the refurbishment works. These serve for record purposes but have no other merit. Some were taken using the Lightroom phone app for the camera and others using the Apple Photos app. I got into a bit of a mess syncing them with Lightroom Classic on my PC! It took a week of fairly intense work to sort out, but the result is that I now understand far more about how syncing works and how to avoid this in the future. I codified this into a written workflow that I shall follow rigorously in future.

Editing workflow
I have also codified my workflow from captured DSLR image to Lightroom to Photoshop and back. Our brains don’t all work the same way, and I find I need such detailed notes to ensure a consistent, logical approach so that it becomes an ingrained procedure. Once I achieve that I shall be confident to depart from it; not dissimilar to the so-called “rules” of composition, etc that can be helpful while not being a slave to them.

Printing & Colour Management
I like the Lightroom Print module and I have started to define a workflow for this. It will be subject to regular revision as I discover more. I shall create some Print templates for various combinations of size, surface finish, B&W/Colour, etc to blend in to that workflow.

Santa brought me a gleaming new monitor for Christmas (BenQ SW270C) so I shall add some colour management aspects into the workflow including using some Wex vouchers for a Calibrite device, although I have to say the colours on the new monitor straight out of the box are far superior to my previous aged HP screen. If I get as far as trying out papers other than Canon’s own, I shall add more steps to my workflow to cover ICC profiles.

Take some photos!
There are some remaining refurbishment works to manage in 2022 but the time has come to dust down my camera bag and take some photos. I have set the bar rather low for 2022 as I have resolved not be disappointed if this turns out to be little more than a record of local scenes through the seasons. More than that will be icing on the cake!

So in summary, although my perception was that I did very little photography in 2021 I actually have a splashback that seems to work very well and I have have codified a lot of what I have learned. In 2022 I look forward to shooting more images and discovering more about implementing colour management and how to get prints that are closer to what I see on the screen.

And of course, I look forward to participating a little more in this forum rather than as a bystander.

A happy and healthy 2022 to all!

[Dave Humphries]

Welcome back David, from another long term CiC absentee!

The splash-back looks amazing, well done.

I have hundreds, if not thousands of quick snaps of DIY projects in progress, storing those in room named folders has not been helped by the change of use of many bedrooms over the last 19 years as the kids grew up and one-by-one moved out, back in again, out again, with remaining kids 'room hopping' as bigger rooms became available - you get the idea

Wishing everyone here a photogenic, and above all healthy, 2022,
Dave

[pschlute]

Loving the splashback