New Pics... Someone is watching over us

Yesterday was quite a day.  In the afternoon, as I was preparing for our afternoon car ride to help Livvy take her nap, she almost locked me out of the house!  The door was about an eighth of an inch away from completely locking.  Surprisingly I caught it just in time!  And I say "surprisingly" because I was super exhausted and sort of shuffling around in slow motion.  I have to give myself a pat on the back though.  I was quick with cat-like reflexes!  Even still, as I was able to avoid what could have been a nightmare, my anxiety had risen.  

Old Edits vs. New Edits Part II

This is part two of the Old Edits vs. New Edits post.  I'd like to document my editing style changes.  So let me jump right into it and rip my photograph edits apart!

This first collage contains one of my favorite pictures of Livvy.  You can see from the original that it is a bit dark, but otherwise a good picture.  It has good composition, color, and contrast.  The middle version is my old edit.  I adjusted the exposure to brighten it up.  I also used a blurring tool to blur everything but her face which I felt at the time was just about the coolest action ever.  I've since changed my mind about this action.  Now, looking back, it just seems silly.  The last version is my current edit.  I adjusted the exposure and brightened it up.  Once brightened, it lost some of it's contrast so I boosted the contrast a little.  I used a skin smoothing action from Paint the Moon to smooth out, ever so slightly, some of the lines from under her eyes.  I adjusted the color and saturated some of the yellows as I felt it was a little too warm for my taste.  I also sharpened her face and added a subtle vignette.

Fix-it Friday

Have you participated in Fix-It Friday over at I Heart Faces?  If you haven't, I highly recommend it.  It allows everyone to work on editing the same photograph together.  It's a great opportunity to learn processing styles from others.  The photograph this week was provided by Jennifer Tonetti-Spellman over at JellyBean Pictures.  I read her tutorial on  *I Heart Faces yesterday.  It was a great post and after reading it, I couldn't wait to get my hands on this photograph! 

Since I couldn't choose between these two color edits, I posted them both.  I list the steps I took to fix-it.  All editing was done in PSE.

* The link for I Heart Faces may not be working.  I keep getting an error message.  I'm sure it will be fixed.

Edit Me... (boy I've missed you)

Do you know how long it's been since I've participated in one my favorite photo challenges?  Quite simple, it's been TOO long!  The Edit Me photo challenge has, hands down, been the challenge I look forward to most!  I love having the opportunity to edit someone else's photograph.  My favorite ones to edit are of people so I was especially happy to see this weeks photograph.  I love the positioning of the children, the tree trunk, the background, etc.; pretty much everything.  With that being said, I made the following very clean and simple edits in PSE:

1.  Cropped.

2.  Brightened a bit,

3.  Boosted contrast,

4.  Warmed up (boosted the yellow hues a tad),

5.  Lifted the shadows from the girls face,

6.  Sharpened faces,

7.  Added a subtle vignette, and

8.  Resized for web.

Quarterly Top 5 Photos - Quarter 1

This is my first time linking up to the Quarterly Top 5 Photos.  If you'd like to join in, you can link up over at Sarah Halstead, Ramblings and Photos, or Click Pray Love.  This was a challenge for me, trying to choose only 5 favorites from the last three months. 

New Pics... Photo Dump!

I almost forgot I had these.  It's a good thing I look through my picture files every now and then.  When I took these pictures, I didn't have any time to post them.  It was overwhelming to think about posting them now since I had to resize each and every one and PSE only allowed me to resize them one at a time, or did it?  After a google search, I found the following.  For those of you that didn't know that PSE was capable of resizing multiple photos at once, feel free to check out this article on About.  Now all I have to do is figure out how to add my watermark, which is in .jpg form, to multiple files at once.  That would be a HUGE time saver! 

Hooray to Photo Feedback!

To change things up a bit, I thought I'd link up to Photo Feedback over at Mom tried it. I've been desperate for some feedback on my photos! I'm always looking for ways to improve. I'm also curious to see how someone else would have taken the shot differently (even processed it differently). I could really learn from that!   This picture is one of my absolute favorites of Alivia!  Usually I have no problems ripping my pictures apart and coming up with a million ways that I could have taken it better/differently.  This one, however, really stumped me!  I am very happy with it!  I have a black & white print of it on my wall at the top of my staircase.  This, to me, was the perfect picture to submit.  I'm really curious to see what I could have done differently and don't hold back, let me have it!  I really look forward to hearing your critiques and applying your feedback to the pictures I take next time!