Before & After

I’m going to let you all in on a couple secrets. #1: Editing photos is my procrastination technique of choice. For example, right now I have a stack of thesis statements I should be grading and correcting. Instead, I’ve been toying around in photoshop. Secret #2: Pretty much every photo I post here is edited. Trust me, it makes me look like a MUCH better photographer than I actually am. Secret #3: I don’t have full fledged photoshop. I have the baby version elements. I dream of the day when I’ll be willing to fork over the cash for the real deal, but in the meantime, you can actually do quite a bit in elements.

Some of you have been bugging me awhile (I’m looking in your direction Stefanie) to give some photography tips, so today I’m going to pass along some of my favorite tips: Take a lot of pictures. Trash the ones that are bad. But don’t be too quick to trash them. Now in a bit here I’m going to get a little technical with editing, so those of you with no interest in photography may want to skip away now. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

I take A LOT of pictures. Especially when it comes to kids, the key for me is to shoot constantly in the hopes that 1 out of 10…or 50…will capture that perfect emotion. When I dump pictures on my computer, or flip through them on the camera, I end up deleting a large majority. However, today I want to tell you…don’t be too eager with the trash button! And here’s the reason, some pretty shabby looking SOOC (straight out of camera) shots can actually become quite special when edited right. Editing will not fix all pictures, but it can do a lot.

Case in point: take a look at this SOOC shot of a rose from Thailand.

I love the concept behind it: shooting from below the rose (I bet you wish you had a picture of me taking this shot; thank goodness, I don’t think there’s any photographic evidence of the lengths I go to to put into motion creative inspiration) in order to capture the sunlight streaming down through the petals. However, when taking the shot I was not pleased in the least with the results I was getting. I shoot in full manual, so played around with various settings for awhile trying to get the camera to capture what was in my mind. I immediately deleted most on the camera, but left a few on there just in case there was something to redeem later. When I put them on the computer, I almost deleted the shots again. But today, in my fleeing from thesis statements, I decided to play around with the shot.

The first thing I did in elements was the auto correct of light and color. Sometimes I don’t like what the auto correct does, but at least 70% of the time, it improves the shot some. As you can see, it’s helped eliminate some of the haze. We’re getting a bit better.

The color tones were still a bit blue, so I made the temperature a little warmer and also darkened the highlights a bit.

And then I turned to my secret weapon: the Pioneer Woman’s actions for elements (best news: they’re free here). These editing sets are great for bringing life to your photos. I use the Fresh Color action on almost all of my photos–but here’s the key. A lot of the actions are “extreme,” which in certain cases, is great, but in other cases, is a bit overboard. So, once you run an action, you’re often going to want to change the opacity of that action until you get the look you want. For example, when you run Fresh Color, it will add a layer of soft light to the photo–I usually take the opacity of this layer down to almost nothing. Here’s what I got after applying the action and fiddling with the opacity of the various layers of the action.

Once again, we’re getting better, but the rose is still a bit soft, I’m wanting it to “pop” more. So I turned to another action: Sharpen this. This allows you to paint on the picture the area you want to sharpen. I ran the action and then painted the rose, which brings out the edges of the petals as well as the stem.

What I’ve got is much better than what I started with, but still a little bland. I thought this shot was calling for a bit of an artistic flare, so I decided to run an action I don’t use very often, but that I know warms things up and emphasizes red tones–PW’s colorized action.

Now we’re getting somewhere; I’m loving the feel and tones of the shot now. However, it now has an antique feel to it that’s screaming for some texture. For a great tutorial on adding texture, go here. First, I added on a rough brick texture. It warmed up the tones too much, so I greatly reduced the saturation on the texture layer.

I wanted to give the picture a bit more of a canvas feel, so I added a linen texture on top of that. I then darkened up the corners just a bit and ended up with this final shot.

Turns out, I really like the shot now. And that, my friends, is why I say don’t be too hasty in deleting; you never know what you might get with a bit of experimentation in editing!