"The Emperor's Mosque", Re-mastered

When I take photos during my travels, I usually come back with a lot of images. Like, a lot of image. Thousands. Culling the images, finding the good ones and then bringing them to life is a very time consuming process. I shoot entirely in RAW (pure sensor data) because I don’t trust the camera to make any decisions for me. So there’s always some processing. For the best images, which are usually shot in challenging lighting conditions (sunset, sunrise), I can easily spend an hour or more trying to fix the image: remove distortion and other lens artifacts, restore sharpness, reduce noise, fix contrast (often requiring manual blending of multiple exposures), blah, blah, blah. I actually love this part because the challenge is to take the very imperfect information captured by the camera and restore it to the scene that I saw. The final step is to add subtle touches that will remove distractions and draw the viewer’s attention. But when I’m in a rush, I cut corners. And then when I have more time, I’ll sometimes re-visit the images and see if I can really get it it right. That’s what I’ve done here on this capture from Badshahi Mosque in Lahore. Still not happy with the final result (limitations of the original capture) but looks much cleaner than the version I had originally published.