Good morning from a cool and grey Hastings.
I have been following this blog by The Daily Post on learning new ideas of editing and general knowledge about photography. This weeks challenge Photography 101: Editing Basics is great for me. I have only recently learnt some of the editing tools on IPhoto and Aperture and now Photoshop Elements 11. My daughter edits her photos all the time on CS6 and tried to tell me what to do but really, the only way to learn is to just experiment and click on different tools to see what you prefer. I did appreciate the comment that it is soooooo important to know about the undo button. So, if I didn’t like what I did I can always undo it. A great plus over the old fashioned black and white printing in the dark room. There the trial and error can cost a lot in paper and chemicals. Plus it was time consuming writing down every step as well to remind myself what exposures I used etc.
So I chose 4 photos of reflections which are hard to get a correct exposure.
I wanted to bring out the details of the leaves and branches by sharpening them and altering the exposures. With Photoshop Elements 11 I just used the auto enhancing which then did what I wanted. I also used the Auto Sharpen tool on a couple of them to make the lines more bizarre.
The most notable change was with the reflection of the cabbage tree leaves. There is so much more detail in them, and they are not lost in the image as a whole.
If I wanted to I would have done it just as the blog says but didn’t have much time. Plus I found the auto enhance feature really handy.
There is so much fun to be had with photo editing. I love the way that editing can change a mediocre image into something much more interesting.