How to Breathe New Life Into Old Images

Fourteen years separate two versions of the same photo, and watching one turn into the other is a quick lesson in how editing taste changes over time. Revisiting old work with newer tools shows you exactly how far your eye has traveled, and it surfaces habits you didn't know you had.

The photo in question came from a 2012 shoot inside the abandoned Satsop nuclear plant in Washington, and in the ninth installment of his "Redo Now" series, Brian Matiash rebuilds it from one of the original unedited frames. Matiash shot the structure with a Canon 5D Mark III and a 15mm f/2.8 fisheye lens, pointing the camera straight up to give the concrete a stone-tentacled, octopus-monster feel. The original edit was a tone-mapped HDR built in Photomatix, drenched in split toning from an era before Lightroom had color grading. Matiash is honest about the result, calling it a visual assault that served its purpose but no longer matches how he sees.

The rebuild leans on a stack of features that didn't exist in 2012. Matiash starts by removing distractions with the older content-aware heal rather than generative remove, since flat sky doesn't need AI to fix a jutting tower. He then reaches for Gen Expand inside the crop tool, a Lightroom addition from the last update, to add ground at the bottom of the frame that the extreme upward angle had cut off. He explains the credit structure clearly: Gen Expand costs one credit per generation on the Lightroom or Photography plans and gives three variations each time, while the Creative Cloud Pro plan grants unlimited standard generations. He also flags a small but real trap. When you flatten a Gen Expand result on top of an earlier remove stroke, baking the pixels in prevents the expansion from invalidating the edit underneath.

From there the edit turns into a tour of Lightroom's masking. Matiash uses the Landscape mask to auto-separate sky, architecture, vegetation, and natural ground onto four labeled masks, then treats each one differently: dehaze and negative clarity on the sky, a warm-then-desaturated temperature trick on the structure, warmer exposure on the trees, cooler tones on the ground. He renames every mask, samples specific hues with point color, and pulls the graffiti radioactive sign forward with a targeted object mask so it snaps on like a light switch. He also demonstrates the new masking refinement sliders, Feather and Edge, which let you push a mask boundary inward or outward and soften the transition.

If you shoot anything on a fisheye or another wide, distortion-heavy lens, the color calibration and optics section here is the part to steal. Matiash removes the purple chromatic aberration the fisheye throws along high-contrast edges with a single slider, then makes a deliberate choice to leave the lens correction profile off because flattening the radial distortion kills the tentacle-monster look he wanted. That decision points to a broader shift in how people edit architecture and interiors now. The tools to automatically correct distortion, remove objects, and expand a frame are cheap and instant, which means the real skill has moved from "can you fix it" to "should you." Leaving distortion in on purpose, keeping encroaching trees that a younger version of yourself would have cloned out, choosing content-aware heal over a generative credit when the sky is flat, these are taste calls, and the calibration panel Matiash praises rewards exactly that kind of intentional, restrained grading over a one-click auto pass.

The comparison at the end is the whole point of the exercise. The 2012 version lifts shadows everywhere until the entire structure looks irradiated, while the 2026 version preserves natural falloff, keeps a highlight where the light actually hits, and reserves the creative punch for the radioactive sign and a subtle blue-channel tone-curve grade. Matiash is careful to say neither is objectively better, and that someone watching may genuinely prefer the older, louder rendition.

See both versions side by side and follow every slider move in the video above.