G2W: 11 (Edits) Flower

SOOC

I always forget to throw a little intro in the beginning of my posts to let folks know what I'm doing!  That's totally me, just jumping into a thought with no preparation.

I've been following along with Good to Wow, a online teaching collaboration between Jill Samter Photography and Ashley Sisk of Ramblings and Photos.  Each week, we are given a prompt and two tutorials:  one to improve our straight out of the camera (SOOC) photography and one to improve our editing.  I'm using Photoshop CS3 to do my edits.

Over these past eleven weeks (wow!), I've already learned a lot.  Its almost hard to keep up with the learning, because once I get something down, I realized I have ten more things to learn.  But totally worth it.  This week's suggestion was Flower.  I have a confession:  I rescued this bud out of the trash, and my husband was deeply embarrassed by me.  Too bad, because I feel ridiculously proud of this one.  Besides, it was sticking out all gorgeous and perfectly faded.

And, as testimony that I am actually learning, I didn't have to do too much to my edits.  I downloaded and ran Ashley's action that performs all the clean edits, and tweaked as necessary.  I decreased the image resize, ran the unsharp mask and saved to flikr.  I did mess around with other actions, and did all sorts of gorgeous things, but I'm starting to feel out my "style."   I like things easy and simple, I'm trying for strong colors and rich blacks.  I don't know if I achieve it, but that's what I like.

I went back to last week's tutorial on sun flares, and played around with it.  Edits below!

W/Edits + Sun Flare

W/Edits