Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Playing with pictures!

Ok, I finally did it! I went to Staples and bought a card reader (couldn't buy the adapter for the card reader I already had, so new card reader it was!). All day yesterday I uploaded 200+ photos from late-August and all of September. I organized, I uploaded to Kodak Gallery. And then I got side-tracked onto a DVD-burning project...

So today, I finally g
ot around to looking through the pictures. And decided that I wanted to play with a few. Remember that hike we did back in August? Well, I loved some of those photos, at least the composition of them, but quite a few needed some adjusting. So I delved into the depths of Photoshop Elements (well, not really... just kinda got started poking around the edges!) and here's my first attempt at "fixing" a photo from that day.



So here is the original photo right out of the camera. Nice composition, decent look on M-Moo's face, but the light is flat and cold. We were mostly in the shadows and the photo just doesn't "pop" the way I want it to.




So here's the same photo, after I monkey'd around with it in Photoshop Elements. Here, I'm still not entirely happy with it. I think it is a little dark. But definitely the sharpness and light quality are better.


And here is the same photo again, with more monkey'ing around. This time, I messed with the contrast, adjusted the shadows, changed the lighting, did a bunch of stuff (thankfully, it's all saved in various layers I did in Photoshop Elements!). I'm not sure if this looks a bit too "processed" now, but I think I like it. The green color in M-Moo's sweatshirt isn't quite true to life, but overall I'm pretty happy with this. What do you think?




Here's the side-by-side comparison. Feedback? Thoughts? Is the corrected photo too "processed"? Is it too washed out? Are the colors not right? I'm just barely getting started with all this, so I welcome all your comments!

ETA: Ok, but in the end, I wasn't happy with that "final" photo above and I did some more tinkering around:




I think I like this one the best... softened it a bit and cleaned up all the schmutz around her mouth and nose (and lightened the dark areas under her eyes too!).

1 comment:

  1. I love what you did with this photo! And I agree, I like the last one best! The previous one had too much contrast i think. It's amazing though, what you can do! She is precious!

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