Before and After Blog Hop: Lake Bowen

Its been a while since I've been able to participate in a blog hop! I absolutely love Monica's Before and After one for Thursdays. Editing photos is my weakness and I've already learned so much from all the entries every week!

Here's a Straight Out Of the Camera shot of Jaina.

Ugh. Its not too pretty. I had my camera set on partial metering which would have worked fine if I had been paying more attention to my light meter. And honestly, it would have been much easier to use evaluative for this shot. At any rate, I did not properly expose this image. Its not even that great an image to begin with. I would normally not even save it, but I thought maybe I'd give it a try to play around with :)

Normally I use GIMP for my editing, but today I just tweaked it in Picasa. I adjusted the exposure by adding highlights and brightness. Then I sharpened it a bit. I then experimented with different tints to get a vintage look. And then I adjusted color tone to warm up the image a bit.

Much better to look at :) However, this does prove a point.... editing a not-so-great capture does not magically save your photo. Instead, start with a great image and only use editing to enhance it.