Lomo Look

I came across a tutorial that teaches how to create the 'Lomo Look' (a look that comes from using a special Russian made camera, as well as specific film processing, which increases contrast and saturation in the pictures), I thought it was pretty neat and thought I'd try it out on a few pics.

SOOC:

Lomo:

SOOC:

Lomo:

SOOC:

Lomo:

Sharpening Practice

Testing out different sharpening techniques, specifically on babies, which we don't want TOO sharp. I thought the blanket in the background would help show the sharpness a little more than just a picture of the baby. Here is the SOOC shot:



In this first edit I used the Unsharp Filter to sharpen the entire image, then I softened the skin and made the eyes pop a bit.



On this one I used the High Pass Filter.



Do you see a difference? Do you have a preference?

Creating Shallow Depth of Field Post-Pro

Using the white background and high key lighting made getting this shot straight-out-of-the-camera pretty difficult. What we were going for was a shallow depth of field, which Mommy blurred in background, but baby flying forward with that surprised look on his face. So, I figured, why not try to create it through editing?

Here's the SOOC shot:



And here it is after editing. Not TOO bad, but I definitely need more practice. I tried to lighten up the background (using the dodge tool) and I think that's what caused his left hand to look a little...I don't know?...glow-y?

More Maks Edits

Still playing around with different techniques.

In this first picture I cropped in, adjusted the color to get rid of the 'blue' hue, sharpened here, and softened there. :-)

Original:

Edited:

On this picture, I basically just needed to brighten it a bit, and bump up the contrast.

Original:

Edited:

Cropped, brightened, increased contrast, and made those eyes POP!

Original:

Edited:

Edit Practice on Maks

This shot was a 'spur of the moment', Maks is here, let's see if I can take a few shots in studio, shot. Therefore, I didn't spend a lot of time readjusting lighting, which made the SOOC (straight out of camera, per PW lol) shot pretty 'blah'. Thank goodness for editing, and I used several different techniques to improve this picture.

Original:

Edit #1 (hard light):

Edit #2 (soft light):

'Eye Pop' Practice on Outdoor Shot of Riley

I'm starting to really 'play' around with different photo editing techniques. Some are from books, others from Pioneer Woman, a great blog I love to read .
Here, I played around with skin softening, using hard light for more contrast, and I tried to make those chocolate eyes 'pop' a little more. This picture was also taken on a day that I was working on using a shallow depth of field to get that nice, blurry background. I was so happy to finally get what I wanted! (it was a little tough due to the lens I had on my camera). Let me know your thoughts. (FYI: I actually didn't edit this on my main photo editing computer, so colors may be off due to that...also, every monitor can make a picture look different, based on monitor settings, but let me know how it looks to you!)

Original:

Edited: