Before & After

A few of my friends have asked what kind of camera I have because my pictures seem so bright. Basically I have a dinky ridiculous camera that I would never recommend. It is a point and shoot Olympus that is about 4 years old & it eats up batteries. There is a pixel missing in the middle that usually ends up looking like a wart on someone's nose. Perhpas someday I'll have a camera that can actually focus in the right place. Sigh...

I've been trying to learn to tweak my photos in Photoshop Elements. I do not profess to be an expert & probably I brighten my photos unrealistically. But it's fun to practice. I open up all my blinds but make sure there are no harsh sunlines on our faces. In this house of whiteness I use my solid white wall as my background (tacky?? probably).

I want to learn the proper balance of using layers like screen, soft light, overlay. And I wish I had some excellent actions but the nicest are a bazillion dollars. I also am trying to aquire an eye for proper cropping techniques. My photos are not perfect even after editing, but we'll take what we can get.

Have you seen Pioneer Woman's photography website? I'm excited for the tutorials on that site. Jessica Sprague and Elisha Snow have a few tutorials on their blogs.

So here are my before & after photoshop versions. On most of them, I used a screen layer and either soft light or overlay layer on top of that.