Before & After Thursday

A Perfect Pear.

I've held on to this photo for several months... Someone brought pears by our office one day at work, and they were just so gosh darn cute and perfectly shaped that I had to snap some pictures of them.

POST-PROCESSING

Totally Rad Actions

*Dirty Lovin' @ 100%, removing texture on the pear

*Green With Envy @ 100% on the grass

*Select-o-Sharp on the pear to bring out the pear's texture

*and a general boost to the contrast

There's not a huge amount of difference between today's before & after, but just enough to make it pop.

*My laptop's hard drive is now cleaned up and back in good health, so I'll be catching up on some blog posts this week.

Happy Pre-Valentine's Day!

Before & After Thursday

Today's Before & After has required no Photoshop editing... hmmmm...

BEFORE:

AFTER:

So how did I do this in-camera, you ask? Well, friends, let me give you a small lesson on color temperature.

Kelvin is the scale for measuring temperature. It basically helps you measure how blue (cool) or orange (warm) the light is. Our eyes are good at judging what is white under different kinds of light, but our cameras are not. Cameras usually take a pretty good guess at determining a white balance (as shown in the first picture), but in this photo, the white snow does not appear pure white as it should be.

In order to give these pictures an artistic "cool" winter feel, I manually changed the Kelvin setting to 2500K to achieve the blue-ish tint.  If you are a photographer, learning to control your white balance is very important. It helps save time in post-processing, and it can also give you an artistic edge if you wish to manipulate it yourself. 

Here's a good site that goes into more details about white balance and color temperature. Happy learning!

Here are a few more of my favorite shots from my 5-minute mini-session with the snow, my pitcher of water, and some wine glasses...  If my neighbors ever watch my impromptu photo sessions with inanimate objects in my backyard, I'm sure they think I'm a little loopy...  but they should be used to it by now. :)

See my neighbor's upside-down house and trees in the pitcher of water? Neato!

Check out the granules of ice and snow at the bottom...

Winter, you've been wonderful...

but God, bring some sunny warmness my way, pretty please... I'm slowly going insane!!!!

Before & After Thursday

Editing photos is fun. I've always loved art, and in a way, Photoshop is like my paintbrush. I can add texture and color and special effects to make the mood of the photo appear the way I see it in my head. But at the same time,  some photos don't need a whole lot of editing. If they're taken correctly in-camera (meaning that I've set all manual settings for light and shutter speed correctly), then they should only need a few tweaks to create a WOW factor...

Case in point, this little beauty below...

BEFORE

AFTER

POST-PROCESSING:

I punched up the saturation to make the colors more vibrant, and then focused mainly on the eyes to make them pop. With a few tweaks here and there, and a crop at the end, I think this picture shows off how flawless this little face really is :)

Doesn't it make you smile?

Before & After Thursday

I sifted through some old flower pictures to grab today's Before & After. I never loved this picture, but I liked it... and after I looked at it again, I realized what it was missing. 

It needed to be vintage.

BEFORE

AFTER

POST PROCESSING:
Totally Rad Actions

*Select o Sharp 100% on flowers and stems

*Get Faded (Autumn) @ 100%

*Dirtie Birdie @ 100%

*Wish You Were Here @ 100%

*Antique Tone @ 100%

*Crystalniqua Delicious @ 100%

*Grandma's Tap Shoes @ 51%

*and a crop at the end

View the larger photo here.

I miss warm weather and flowers and green grass!

Soon, dear camera, soon!

Before & After Thursday

I ran into one of my fabulous friends, Lee Ellen Starks, at the park several months ago while I was waiting for some clients for a session. Lee Ellen had brought her dog, Tolmi, out for a romp in the park. I snagged a couple pictures before they headed off. I gave this finished photo to Lee Ellen for Christmas, since she loves her "Tolmers."

BEFORE

AFTER

For the processing on this one, I used Photoshop Mama's Sketch Tutorial on YouTube. Then I darkened the black areas around his eyes and mouth. If you're able to view it large, my favorite thing about the picture are the teeny tiny bubbles of spit on his tongue :)

This is a two-fold post. I'm here to plug my amazing friend Lee Ellen because she's an incredible songwriter and musician. Check her out her next gig at Heroes Coffee on January 15.

Also check out Lee Ellen's YouTube channel and MySpace page and blog.

View pix from our photo shoot here and here from over a year ago!

Before & After Thursday

So I've done a handful of Before & Afters on my post-processing using Totally Rad Actions.. Well this past week, I received a nice surprise. Totally Rad Actions tweeted on their Twitter account that they were loving my before and afters... and as a result, I have had over 400 hits on my blog! I was totally stunned, but also very humbled.

So in lieu of a Before & After today (I don't have one prepared because of the holidays!) check out these Before & After recipes on the TRA site...

Happy New Year's Eve! See you in 2010!

Before & After Thursday

I was inspired by a visit to Silver Dollar City on Sunday for today's Before & After. I've always liked the vintage saloon photos and wanted to give the same processing to some buildings I photographed in downtown Springfield on a photo walk this summer.

Happy Christmas Eve!

BEFORE

AFTER

POST PROCESSING:

Totally Rad Actions

*Oh Snap! @ 100%

*Grandma's Tap Shoes @ 100%

*Old Skool @ 83%

*Crystalniqua Delicious @ 44%

*Destiny Starr @ 39%

*Get Faded @ 16%

You can view a larger photo here.

See recent Before & Afters here and here and here.. and check out the blog for this past month to see other photos using TRA processing...

Thanks for looking!

Before & After Thursday

Charles and Alice were one of my first engagement sessions back in 2008. With my point-and-shoot Canon Powershot S5IS, I got the shot below. I didn't have editing software at the time, so I thought I would take another look at this picture today and see what I could come up with since I have the tools now.

BEFORE

AFTER


Using Totally Rad Actions
Punch-Out!!! @ 100%
Shadow Separator ~ lighten 100%
Troy @ 57%
Crystalniqua Delicious @ 57%
Then a crop at the end


P.S. If you've picked up a Springfield Business Journal this week, Charles may look familiar to you. More about that on Friday's post!

Before & After Thursday

Here's a photo I snapped from our van when we were rolling through Miami this past August, the day before we headed to Brazil on our mission trip.

Here's the straight out of camera (SOOC) shot...

BEFORE

AFTER

Processing:

Oh Snap! @ 100%

Big Blue @ 20% on the building and sky

Yin Yang @ 20% on the building and sky

Pool Party @ 100%

Queenie Madison Dirty Texture @ 87%

and then I cloned the upper right corner to get rid of the building peeking in from the right.

See the larger and much more glorious picture here on my flickr account. Click on the view sizes option at the top to see the various sizes.

These are the kind of awesome buildings I wish we had in Springfield... architectural delights :)

Before & After Thursday

Since I've recently gotten some new editing software and some time-saving Photoshop actions for post-processing, I thought I would start showing some Before-and-Afters just for fun. And Thursday is the special day.

Here's one of my favorites from Curtis and Natalie's engagement session: (as I mentioned before in a previous post, I LOVE to cut people's heads off!) :)

BEFORE

AFTER

Processing:

Totally Rad Actions

Old Skool (Standard) @ 100%

and some tweaking with Yin/Yang for the lights and dark textures.

This small picture doesn't do it justice... to view the bigger picture and the beautiful textures, view it larger here on my flickr account. You won't regret it!

Come back on Thursdays to see more transformations... You know you want to.