Before/After + trip update and kinda tutorial....

EDIT: WOW! Thanks Monica! I'm so excited to have my photo picked as favorite last week!

It's Thursday again, and my favorite time of week! Pixel Perfect's Before/After blog hop!

Before:



I loved this shot, but it's a little underexposed. It was actually a candid I took during a session, and I was packing up my stuff....he just looked so cute, I snapped with whatever my camera was set at.

After:



I love how this turned out :) This photo is from the same session as my entry from last week...here's a few more shots I edited like the one last week...







I hate using the word tutorial, because I am learning so much myself, I don't really feel like I should be "teaching" anything just yet, but I had a lot of people ask me how I edited my photo from last week, so I thought I'd share what I do!

I edit in Lightroom3 and and Photoshop CS5....these photos I edited completely in Lightroom, but you can get the same effect in Photoshop pretty easily.

I spend a lot of time playing with the curves. It is amazing to me how much drama you can create in a photo with slight changes to the light and dark areas. For this effect, I get the curve looking like this:



I also upped the blacks a little, and the contrast. I almost always bump up the clarity a little too! (In photoshop, you can get the same clarity using unsharpen mask or a high pass filter - just don't over due it!)

I added a little vignetting, and adjusted the exposure, fill lights, and brightness until I was happy with the results!

The best piece of advice I was ever given, whether it be for taking photos or editing(or getting to Carnegie Hall, if you feel so inclined!), is practice, practice, practice! I edit ALL my photos. Even my snapshots....and I take a lot of photos. Whether I have a session or not, I try to not let a week go by without taking at least 300 photos.....usually it's closer to 500 - 1000. I edit them, not because anyone is going to see them.....chances are for most of them, no one will! I edit them for the practice. The more I use these programs, the better I get at them.....the more photos I take, the stronger a photographer I become! :)

Anyway, S and I's trip to Rochester was good. Our Rockstar surgeon checked out my munchkin, and we're looking at no surgery in the immediate future. We need her to start trying to make "B", "D", "P" and "T" sounds....sounds you need your palate to function to make. If we don't have those in the next year, we're looking at probably having a surgery to fix the function of the palate. About 20% of kids with clefts need some extra palate surgery to help with function. So, please pray for speech. It would do my husband's heart good to hear her call him "Dada"....a man can only take being called "Mama" for so long, and, well, we're tired of sharing the title.....it gets confusing!

It was really cool yesterday though... I got a phone call from our local hospital asking if i could come help them get a newborn baby with a cleft eating. I guess my mini-rampages about giving babies with clefts feeding tubes before exhausting all the other options finally worked! It was so great to be able to help, and to give this family hope. It's such a shock to find out your child has a birth anomaly (I hate the term birth defect....it makes it sound like my kid was defective, and she most certainly was not. Anomaly means "a deviation from the common" and let me assure you, S is ANYTHING but common!) It's such an honor to be able to show family's S at birth, and photos of S now, and see the relief come across their faces. It's an amazing blessing to get to help others like that!

Anyway,I hope you all have a beautiful day, and hop on over to Pixel Perfect and check out everyone's amazing edits!