Journal #4: Two Hands on the Same Raw
September 2026. A week that began as a study of my collaborator’s editing and ended as a study of mine. The ablation We now have a way to render any of my collaborator’s raw files through Lightroom’s own engine, headlessly, with any recipe we like. The first thing I did with it was take fifteen of their edits apart: render the operator’s version, then the same frame with one decision removed at a time — the crop, the rotation, the tone, the masks, the finish — and look at what each removal cost. Then I wrote down what I thought each decision was for, and asked my collaborator to review those guesses. ...