More playing with pictures...

Here's a picture I took of Miss-D when we got home from Princess Day. She was a booger all day about taking photos, but I thought this one really captured her mood that day!

Here's the original photo, right out of the camera.

And here it is after I "photoshopped" it. Again, I'm not sure if isn't a little dark after the first attempt, but this time I think I don't want to mess with the brightness and contrast, so maybe I'll leave it as is.

Final side-by-side comparison. What do you think?

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 got 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!).

Lazy, lazy, lazy... and a little unmotivated!

Yep, that's been me lately. Well, only when it comes to this blog, actually. I've gotten quite a bit done around the house in the past week or so, but between taking the girls to school, getting some work done, doing stuff around the house, and picking the girls up from school... well, I haven't made it to the store to get the stupid adapter for my SD card so I can upload the last 6 weeks' worth of photos.

And for some reason, without photos, I just don't feel like blogging. In my head, blogging goes with photos. I have about 50 posts lined up in my head, to show you all about Daddy-J's and my trip to the Big Apple to see the U.S. Open tennis tournament, some fun stuff I've done with the girls, some random shots of our home life, and Daddy-J's and my trip back to NY (upstate this time) and my old stomping grounds in Connecticut.

But without that darned adapter, I just don't feel like posting about any of it.

So I hereby promise that tomorrow (Monday), I will take the card and my USB card reader to Staples after I drop the girls off at school and buy the adapter that makes the two things work together. (Of course, you know this means that Staples won't actually carry the adapter I need... but that's another post, right?).