Outdoor Photo Editing.....

So, Brent Riggs (Riggs Family Blog) has a post up on his linky tools blog, offering a challenge of sorts where everyone who participates is a winner! Can't beat that, right?

Anyone who prays for Abby, and follows his blog(s) knows the man takes some AMAZING photos...... not only of his beautiful family, but of his travels and the world around him. He's put up one of his photos from a recent trip for anyone who wants to edit it, and link back up to his blog.......then, being a generous soul, he's going to do a demonstration showing everyone who links up how to make outdoor photos come alive! Given that, I'm ALWAYS wanting to learn more and more about photography, and photo editing, I'm linking up! :)

Here's his original:


Gorgeous, right?
Here's my edit -

So, here's what I did. I edited this in LightRoom 2. I use Photoshop a lot also, but I love how Lightroom makes it really easy for me to play around with different ideas and techniques non-destructively.....

First, I cropped the image so that the line where the ground meets the horizon fell about 1/3 of the way up the page. This also put the skyline pretty close to 1/3 of the way from the top of the page.

Under Basic Adjustments, I upped both the blacks and contrast slightly. Upped clarity to around 50, and nudged up the saturation and the vibrance.

On the tone curve, I moved the darks and shadows down and the lights up a little.

I upped the saturation of the yellows, purples, and blues.......but just a little. Upping them too much gave new meaning to "Purple Mountains Majesty".....they looked like they could have been kin to Barney.

Then I sharpened the photo using a .8 radius.

After I exported it from Lightroom, I ran it through NoiseWare Community Edition, as this was a JPG and I find they often get more noisy as I adjust things. I usually shoot in RAW, which gives me a little more leeway.

I feel kinda funny writing this all out, as I don't really have the experience to be teaching or doing tutorials.....lol. I'm also on an uncalibrated monitor at the moment, so if my colors are slightly off, my apologies! I just think this is a really awesome opportunity for any/all of us interested to learn something new!

SO... go check out his blog, edit the photo to your liking, blog about whatcha did, and link on up! Let's all learn something new together! It'll be great!