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Presets!

It's snowing and overcast today, so perfect time to relax at home and look through old photos that would be fun to edit. There are a gazillion presets (a lot of them are free:) out there for whatever editing software you use. I just got Lightroom 3 a few weeks ago and it's become my new obsession to search for the *perfect* preset! Presets will change your life! They are a fun, easy and quick way to completely change the mood of your photo. Of course there are times where manually editing a photo is the best choice, but when editing a slew of photos from a shoot, it's nice to choose a particular preset that matches what you were trying to capture, and then use them with each photo; this way the look and feel of your pictures are consistent.  Here are some photos I took a while ago that I thought would be fun to edit using presets. Now you can see what a difference a click of a button can do to a photo!


Original SOOC:

Preset: Color Creative: Direct Positive

These tulips were taken in Dover, DE when we lived there. Every spring the most beautiful flowers could be seen downtown. Really bright reds, yellows, oranges, white, purples...it was fun to take a stroll to see these gorgeous flowers (or even take a different route home so we could drive by them:) Anyways, this preset is called Color Creative-Direct Positive. This one already comes in the Lightroom library. I love how the reflection in the water has more definition!

Original SOOC:

Preset: PH Fashion Shoot III v

When my husband's family came to town for my brother in law's wedding, we took a quick one day trip to NYC. I was trying to get them to do that "walking toward the camera and looking like hot stuff", you know what I'm talking about, right?! Anyway, apparently they weren't catching on! But, I like the way the photo turned out anyway! I love how Em is like "Woah, look how tall that building is!" Yes, Em, we are in New York! I love the coloring of this preset, I did bump up the exposure just a little bit to brighten the photo, but doesn't the coloring make this photo so much more interesting?

Original SOOC:

Preset: Famous Hobo

Like I said above, my brother in law was getting married. His wife's grandpa owns this store in the very beautiful farm country of Pennsylvania. We went to check it out and see how they produce feed for horses all over the U.S., pretty neat! It was hard to decide which preset to use for this one. I went back and forth between black and white and vintage with a little color...in the end I chose this one; Famous Hobo. I like the browns and that old feeling it gives to the building. If you didn't know when this was taken and had only seen the edited version, how far back do you think you could date this? Neat, huh? (You might notice I cropped out the car, too.)

I hope you've enjoyed seeing the differences between an SOOC (straight out of the camera) photo and an edited one. Post processing is just as important as the shoot itself. An edit can make or break a photo, ruin it or make it gorgeous! 

For now,

Susan

Girls Just Wanna Have Fun

Last night my daughter had her "best friend" over for a sleepover. They are like two peas in a pod and really get along great! I'm so happy to see her have a close friend so soon after moving here. Being an Air Force family and moving every 3 or so years makes it hard to make good friends. Thankfully these two met in class and hit it off quick! It's crazy to see my little girl growing up so fast!
So, the fun night started off when I picked them up from school and we got steamers (warm milk with a shot of flavor and whipped cream) on the way home. They quickly discovered the goodie bags I made up for them with lots of fun girly stuff inside (lip gloss, color changing nail polish, candy, glow sticks, notebooks, pens, fizzy bath hearts, stickers etc...). I had written down a list of ideas on the white board to help avoid that saying "we're bored!", and it worked! They made a fort, painted each other's nails (so cute), played upstairs, ate chocolate chip cookie dough (I mean, made cookies:), had a tea party, ate pizza,  played the wii. Unfortunately, her friend didn't last all night over here, but irregardless they had a blast together. C was understanding and is already talking about next time:)

Did You Know?

Did you know you can move around the focus point on your camera?

This is a neat little thing I just learned from reading Pioneer Woman's (photography) page (LOVE her by the way!). She's got lots of great info and tidbits to help you learn more about your camera which results in better shots. So, instead of moving your camera to focus on your subject or cropping out parts of the picture later, you can adjust the focus point in your camera before you actually take the picture. This way you don't have to miss out on those really cool backgrounds, but still keep your main subject in focus. Every camera is different, so you might have to check your manual for how to change your focus point while in manual mode. Here are some shots I took just playing around with the focus point to show you as an example.


This first one the focal point was in the middle where it automatically is. See how his feet are in focus?

Here I was in the same spot but moved the focal point up two places so now his face and the bear are in focus, not his feet :)

Pretty cool huh? Ok, so you might have already known this, but I did not. So, chances are there might be others out there that didn't know this neat trick too (hopefully, right?!) Now, go grab your camera and your manual and try it out! Good luck getting your little ones to participate, I had to let this one play games on the wii if he would sit still for me for a few minutes :)

~Susan