The Pros and (Mostly) Cons of Upgrading to a 4K Monitor

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I'm in the process of getting back into photography which will mean a new camera, more on that in a later post. But the first step for me was a new computer, one with the horsepower to handle a modern day camera and its RAW files. Along with the computer comes a new 4K monitor. 4K is great for media consumption, right? Your characters on your favorite show or movie really look detailed and realistic. Scenery looks wonderful. Everything looks great, right? Wrong. You know what doesn't look great? That photo I took in 2012 that I thought was sharp but is very much not. I transferred over my past catalogs of photos over to Lightroom Classic and eagerly began opening up some of my favorite photos. At first I was happy with how the colors looked and how the scene was composed. Then I noticed it was a little soft. Well I had just gotten a new contacts prescription so that must be it. Changed to my glasses and the photos were even blurrier! I went through photo after photo and most ca

Battery Point Lighthouse From Shore

Battery Point
Battery Point Lighthouse
I've been hanging on to this shot for a while now. I've been wanting to share it, but it had never hit that threshold of me liking it enough to post publicly. Especially when I look at where this photo started off. A little about the sight first. This is Battery Point lighthouse which during higher tides is cut off from the mainland. Unlike a lot of lighthouses these days this one has a lighthouse keeper that lives on site, and as a result very unsightly electricity and phone lines are strung up between the rock/island and the "mainland" (for lack of a better term). These lines didn't work as leading lines so they were just a distraction. So I set about getting rid of them. Now it's entirely possible there's an easier way to do this, and maybe even better tools, but I used the tool I was familiar with, Aperture. Using a mix of the clone tool and the automatic retouch brick I was able to get rid of the wires and a power pole that would have looked odd if I had left it there with no wires connected to it. But I could still see where the lines were. I had used a brush that was too hard and too small; softening the brush up and enlarging it gave me better blending, but I was still seeing them. The tool that finally got me to a point where I felt the lines were truly gone was the Skin Smoothing brick.

Other photo info. This is an HDR composite image made up of seven bracket shots. The day was a cloudy dull day, but I like the color I was able to get out of the foliage with the red and white of the buildings just peeking out. I can't imagine what it must be like there during a bad storm.

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The Pros and (Mostly) Cons of Upgrading to a 4K Monitor