I’ll admit up front, I’m a hoarder. I hang on to all sorts of junk just in case it might turn out to be useful one day. In the attic, I’ve got a box of IT components and cables for technologies that have been obsolete for decades. My wife despairs of me. The same is true of my digital image collection. I was an early adopter when digital cameras came out, and I’ve got 25 years of images - mostly RAW - sitting in SSDs, hard drives, backup drives, and backups of backups. Huge numbers of them didn’t get properly processed at the time I took them. Quite a lot, while in focus and reasonably framed, just didn’t look as good as they did in my imagination when I pressed the shutter. Many have exposure issues, visual clutter, or just felt like they were going to be too much hard work to sort out.

The problem has only magnified as camera technology has moved on. When photographing wildlife, I’ll crank the camera up to maximum frame rate, turn on pre-capture, and let fly. I can come back from two hours at the local wetlands reserve with 4000 images, long sequences of which are almost, but not quite, identical.

I try to cope with today’s volume problem with workflow and a bit of AI assistance. After a first pass to eliminate all the bad (out of focus, out of frame…) images, I’m starting to trust tools like Excire Photo to round up near duplicates, and recommend candidates for deletion. I’ve thought about letting the tools loose on the back catalogue, too, but as part of my migration from Flickr to self-hosted Immich, I’ve been going back through my old ‘not good enough’ shots and discovered that I can bring some of them back to life.

A lot of processing techniques that would have been fiddly and ridiculously time consuming twenty, or even ten years ago are now remarkably straightforward with today’s software and desktop computing power. While I don’t like being tied to Adobe’s software suite, their Lightroom / Photoshop subscription bundle at around £10 a month feels worth the money and offers ever-improving capabilities, but where Adobe goes, others follow, and Affinity and open source image processing tools are not too far behind the cutting edge of their higher-cost cousins. I’m still trying to decide in my own mind what I consider reasonable use of AI processing, and what feels like ‘cheating’, but at the moment I feel comfortable using AI denoising and limited distraction removal. (So far, I’m drawing the line at letting generative AI create new image elements with the exception of bits of background behind clutter that’s been removed).

What feels like the big change for me is the ease with which I can pull out information hidden in the raw files, for example correcting images that felt too badly exposed to be worth bothering with. Tidying up wires or other unwanted details used to mean hours of cloning and smudging, and now it’s done in the press of a couple of buttons. I had a load of images I’d rejected because I let the camera sensor get dusty (back before self-cleaning technology!). Now that’s fixed in seconds, along with lining up wonky horizons - seriously, what was wrong with my sense of the horizontal back then?!!

Washed out or muddy images are easy to turn into sharp pictures with good contrast, and a more pleasant dynamic range, and the ultra grainy high-ISO pictures look great after the AI’s done some smoothing.

There’s no magic here, of course, though the denoising sometimes feels that way. What has changed is that photos that weren’t really worth the time and hard work to process and correct are now fixable with minimal effort, and can turn into ‘keepers’ after all. And, of course, it’s fun going back and remembering the travels and excursions where we took those so-so photographs all those years ago.

Go on, fire up Photoshop, Lightroom, Affinity, Darktable, Luminar or your tools of choice and see if there are any could-be masterpieces hidden away in your ‘not quite good enough’ archives!