beautiful flowers with some before & afters

I just loooooove this beautiful field of yellow and I so hope the flowers stick around for a while. It's only a few minutes from my house which makes me love it even more.


Lily was such a good girl for me.




Stella just wanted to eat dirt, but she sure looked adorable while she ate it.




Abbey and Lily have become such good friends lately. They're always happy to be together and they're even happier to go out for treats after they're done modeling for us.


Here's Audrey with her hands quite full. It's so nice to have such a good friend to shoot with. It makes every shoot so much more fun!


And I always love it when photographers share their before and after shots, so here are a couple from this shoot:

I'll start with the SOOC shot. Actually, it's SOOL or straight out of lightroom:


I shot this with my 5D and I borrowed Audrey's 85mm 1.8 lens for this shoot. I wanted to see how I liked that focal length on my full frame, and I really really liked it. My settings were ISO 200 F/2.8 and shutter speed 400.

Here's the fully edited image:


Here is what I did. Now this will probably sound like gibberish if you're not familiar with photoshop. But if you do use photoshop, here ya go:

I first ran the RAW image through lightroom and adjusted the white balance just a bit. I forgot to set a custom white balance when I started shooting (we were in a bit of a rush) so my original images were just a bit too cool. The exposure was pretty good so I didn't mess with much else in lightroom. So I saved it as a jpeg and opened it up in photoshop CS3.

I brightened with levels & curves. Used a channel mixer adjustment layer to intensify color and masked back skin at 75%. You never want to saturate the skin too much. It makes it look red or orange...yucky. Then I ran portraiture on their skin at around 50% masking back eyes, eyebrows, & mouth. Slightly sharpened girls using smart sharpen. Cropped a bit. Oh, and I also ran the 'Oh snap' action from totally rad actions at around 20% just to give it a bit more contrast.

I think that's about it. I always do EVERYTHING on an adjustment layer so I can brush on or brush off what I need to. It makes everything you do adjustable. So if you're not familiar with adjustment layers or layer masking, then google it and find some tutorials. They'll change your life!

Here's one more before & after of Lily:


So, I followed pretty much the same steps as above. Of course, every image is a little different, so the opacity's of the layers and amount of layer masking etc. will be a bit different too.

I hope all that made some sense!!!