I was bored. This was the result.

I’ve been having a lot of fun playing with Photoshop and Lightroom “actions” lately.  Actions are basically macros for each program that apply particular adjustments, filters, etc…to photos.  It basically makes things fast and easy.  I still make most of my own adjustments on photos I edit, but sometimes the actions I have end up working beautifully.  Here are a few examples from some photos I took the other week.

For the first one…here’s the original:

I guess it doesn’t look too terribly bad straight from the camera but it looked a little bland to me…and crooked.  I’m sure most people wouldn’t noticed the crookedness, but if you look at the bench she’s sitting on you can tell it’s not exactly straight and that kind of thing bothers me when I get prints made.  So after I loaded this set up into Lightroom, I cropped it a bit, straightened it and adjusted the contrast and coloring some.  This is what it looked like after that:

Since I liked these photos a lot, I wanted to play around with them in Photoshop.  Typically I would have just left the photo as it was, but I was bored one night and had recently downloaded some new Photoshop actions that I wanted to play around with.  I applied an action that really made the photo look soft and dreamy and I thought the look suited the photo really nicely.  Now, I realize that the photo would look even better if Anna was in a cute fairy costume or something, but it was an impromptu shoot so I got what I got….Grover hoodie and big pink bow and all.  :)

Here’s the finished product:

Nice, eh?  I think it looks good, if I do say so myself.  (I’m so modest, I know.)  ;)

Here are two others I did:

Before:

After:

The “after” almost looks a little too yellow up on her forehead…  It’s easy enough to fix and I might play around with it some more…but I think I’m ok with it looking like this.

Before:

After:

I love this one…pink kitty rain boots, Grover hoodie, pink bow and all.  :)

So there ya have it.  Photoshop is fun!  :)