Giving up Tobacco

Happy New Year! My New Year's Resolution: I have decided to finally give up Tobacco. I have seen the evidence and the damage that can't be reversed. So, I have decided to give it up. 

There!

But wait, I am a lifetime non smoker, so what's going on here? 

Well I have devoted these long dark evenings to scanning decade old slides, giving them their correct historical timestamp and backing up the results. (At this point can I recommend Xnview, a really useful free image sorter and viewer. You can launch your photo editor from Xnview with a single key, make and save a slide show, create a photo web page and also, change the time stamp of your pictures and an awful lot more. A great piece of software. Plug over).

So, here's the first evidence of a tobacco habit:

Here we have splendid Salisbury Cathedral. This is an early example of tobacco abuse. It all started so simply: I bought an ND grad filter. You know, the plastic rectangle you hold in front of the lens, the top half is dark and the bottom half is clear. It rescues your  over exposed skies as you take the picture. The problem is, it can make an average day look rather overcast. 

Enter the Tobacco grad filter. That's more like it. Now the skies are a little bit more cheerful.

But you can't use tobacco occasionally. Its addictive, and so I started using the Tobacco grad more and more. I needed stronger doses.

I started to ruin perfectly good blue skies. Everything needed that Tobacco grad. You must watch for the signs. Slowly all your pictures turn brown at the edges.

If this isn't nipped in the bud you end up with pictures like this next one:

This apocalyptic view of Florence is a result of extreme Tobacco abuse, the stongest grad filter applied with a wide angle to a sunset. Gaze on my works ye mighty and despair!

So, is there hope? Yes, you can step away from the grad. Just leave it at home. Bracket your pictures if you wish, try not to burn out the sky and use Photoshop's Shadows and Highlights to bring them back. Finally add a software grad. At least you didn't ruin the picture in the camera.

Finally, I have proof that a badly browned image can be brought back using a graded layer in Photoshop. Select a nice sky blue, select "color" in the layer type and set the gradation from foreground to transparent and about 80%. Here is one I rescued:

So, Carpe Diem, give up Tobacco! You can do it :-)