Before & After

I've had some people ask me to give them some photoshop tips, which is so funny to me because I am so new to photography and photoshop. But anyways, I thought I'd post a sooc (straight out of camera) shot before and after I've edited. FYI, I'm no photoshop pro AT ALL! But, I have spent countless hours lately, playing around in photoshop to improve my pictures. This isn't the best picture in the world, but I love that I got a real smile outta that boy (and I haven't posted very many of Mase lately and feel kinda bad about that. He's tough one to photograph these days.

I use Photoshop elements 5.0 right now, however I think I may be upgrading soon. Yay! Okay, so if you've never used photoshop before, this will all probably sound like a foreign language to you, but here I go.......I 1st duplicated the layer and changed it to screen layer. I lowered the opacity to around 80%. I then flattened the layers and duplicated again. This time, I ran it as a hardlight layer at 20% and flattened again. After that, I bumped up the saturation 6%. I then sharpened just the eyes, and ran Ren's defog action at 75%. To top it off, I burned the edges to give it a more finished look. It's a lot of steps, I know. Editing takes a lot of time. And, every picture I edit needs a little something different. But, I believe that every picture can use some tweaking to look even better. I hope that helps anyone who was wondering what I do.