Fiddling with Photoshop
I got a copy of Photoshop Elements 6 a while back and have finally gotten to sit down and play with it tonight. I used some pictures I took of Tommy at the playground earlier this week as fodder. Online tools like picnik are great, but I found Photoshop’s ability to apply lighting and color fixes to only certain areas of the picture to be very handy. And the quick selection tool makes selecting the areas to fix (like too-dark shadows or too-bright highlights) a snap. I originally changed the blue saturation to make the sky look nicer, but it also bumped up the blue in Tommy’s shirt, which looked weird, but the quick select tool let me select the entire sky and adjust it, leaving the shirt’s color intact. This was really just trial and error and plunking through the menus seeing what they did, but I was impressed with what the app can do. Fun!
Original, with dark shadows and washed out flesh.
Touched up with blue-er blues and a more visible Tommy.
This was all done in JPG as I think Lindsey still has the RAWs on her laptop. I just grabbed the beta of Lightroom 2 last night, and it’ll be fun to see what I can do with the RAW file.

