Subtle Differences

So it's been a while. Sorry. Things were crazy and oh so busy while we were 'vacationing' in the states. With our return to 'paradise' things are beginning to settle down a little bit. I have so many pictures to post. We did some really fun things while we were away and so I'll try to make a post a day to spread it out. But before I can do that I have several families who are waiting patiently for the pictures I took of them weeks ago. Needless to say I'm drowning in my own post processing. For those of you unfamiliar with the pping world - it's where you take your raw image (or the picture straight out of camera, sooc for short) and you 'fix' it in photoshop. While doing this I've learned a lot of new things. I thought I'd show you a few of the possibilities since I need to post, but the vAkA pictures aren't ready yet.This is the original picture. It was the first time I had taken pictures of a family on the beach and my camera settings were all wrong. This family is wonderful for being my first experiment. It was a flop, but what can ya do? Needless to say I came home very discouraged. However, since then my pp skills have improved and as you can see they weren't lost at all!All I did to this photo was the color correction and added some contrast. All that means is I changed the color so it would be right for the skin tone and made the darks stronger so the photo feels more three dimensional.I'm not sure you can tell the difference between this one and the one above it on the web, but there is a difference. I added what's called a 'glow' to the photo. Basically you blur it out and then add some of the detail back to create a softer look. This is often applied to portraits because it evens out blemishes in the skin.And finally I just wanted to show you that there are differences even in the black and whites. You can give all kinds of tints to the b/w so you can get any color combination you want.

And this is only the simplest of pp that is done! I haven't done any of the fun stuff at all to it! And it was also in good lighting. When there is harsh lighting it takes a million little things to get it right. So that's it for the subtle differences, but I'll be back to show you something incredible.