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!  :)

Last night I got a chance to shoot Anna in an actual photo studio with my own camera equipment (as opposed to the 3 weeks I worked at Picture People…everything feels way too “cookie cutter” there to really truly feel like a photo studio).  There were lights that we were able to use and it was fun figuring them out.  I have a couple of lights but not the high quality box lights that sync with the camera like they had.  It was really a lot of fun.

I had big plans for the shoot…a couple of outfits for Anna, several different backdrops, and some different props.  Well, that didn’t quite work out.  Anna is a photographer’s nightmare on a GOOD day and last night was no exception.  She really wanted nothing to do with having her picture taking and bribary didn’t even seem to work real well.  I was able to still get a bunch of good shots (at least I think so) but only in one outfit and on a white backdrop.

Anyway, here is a link to the full album of photos: http://theboghs.com/photos/thumbnails.php?album=36.

Here are a bunch of my favorites.  This first group is before we figured out the lighting.  You can tell that they’re kinda dark and a bunch have ugly shadows in them.  A few look a little too “yellow” and I need to go back and edit them a bit more.

Yes, that last one is a look of pure exasperation.

This last group was when we had figured out the lighting.  Isn’t it amazing what a difference good lighting makes?  Everything just looks so much sharper and crisp.  I’m really really happy with the way these came out.  Especially the ones at the end with the picture frame.

I’m definitely going to be making some prints of a few in the last group to hang on the wall.  I’m so happy with they way they turned out….but gosh…3 year olds are hard to work with!  :P

I took this photo tonight of the moon shining on the bay behind my in-law’s house.  Except for the reddish lens flare on the top of the moon I really love the way it turned out!

Apparently I felt that a regular blog was not enough and I created a PhotoBlog for myself today. So between this blog, the PhotoBlog and my photo gallery you should have more pics than you could ever want to see. I’m going to try to update the PhotoBlog every day with a new photo. The link’s at the top of the page, or here –> http://www.theboghs.com/photoblog.

So I bought this color calibration software for my laptop and for our desktops so that when I edit photos I know they’ll print exactly as they look on my screen. In the past I’ll edit a photo so it looks like I want it to look and when I print it it looks nothing like what I want. So frustrating…

So I bought this:

It not a super duper high end calibrator, but hopefully it’ll work well enough for what I want to do.

So anyway, I received it in the mail today and calibrated my laptop and the difference after was pretty amazing. They let you see a before and after (which I wish I had printscreened to post here) and the changes were very very noticeable. So hopefully this will allow me to make prints of photos exactly the way I want.

Ok…off to edit some new photos. :)

We’re in the middle of our move to Houston. We’ve been in Kansas City with Dan’s parents for over a week now and should be finishing our move in the next couple of days. Anna has had a blast out here with her 4 (almost 5) year old cousin Alex. We’ll definitely have to make sure that we make it out here more often.

I got some cool pics of Anna in front of a fountain the other day that I wanted to share. I converted them to black & white, which I rarely do with photos and think they turned out quite nice. Enjoy! :)