Little Corner of Ania

Playing around with photoshop today - took some pictures earlier and the light by the big windows at the sportshall we were at was really nice.... and with some editing the photos kinda turned out neat imho :)

Let me show you...(okay, they're resized and saved for web - so the quality isn't all that - but hopefully they still give you an idea)

Actions is nice and cool but most do still require either perfect photos or good prepped photos..kinda...imo.. and as I'm still pretty average when it comes to shooting I have to prep my photos some to get the most out of certain actions..

The original straight out from camera photo:

One side is a bit dark. Manually taken at f/5.3 1/125s and at 123mm. I'm thinking that the shutterspeed should have been at 1/100 or lower. Hm. Or rather. He should have been turning his head a lil more to the left to let the light on his face more evenly. Or wait. I should have been doing this in a studio with perfect controlled lights. yeah. right. ;p
Now, if I used the action I had in mind for this photo directly I'd get something along this kind of result:

Notice how the shades really doesn't look good here?

Now, I took the original picture and played with curves - smoothing out the shades (first picking a general point and brightening it up then picking one of the darker points and brightening just the area between that + the medium area kinda...err..hard to explain in words :p) then marking the darkest shadesome before running the same action again:

Tada! Much better! The colors were a bit "plain" as I had to lighten up the shades (and thus the already-lit areas became lighter too) so I added a warm photofilter to the picture in the end.

I know. A tad work which could be avoided if I did the right take in the first place - but ohwell. I think my point is more like...I know some people have been disappointed in actions..thinking they could solve everything & anything.... but no...it really does help if you know what to do manually (or like me, just likes to play wo knowing what things really do ;p)...then these actions just like, enchantes it even more kinda. Like the last touch or something like that. *babling away*

I know for sure that I find before-after photos pretty cool myself - but that's prolly because I'm such a photonerd atm. Still wanted to share w/you :)

Gotta share this one of Amalie aswell - love her positure here...her hand on her chin....aww...