Thursday's Thrill

Oooooh do I have something to post about! This is probably not going to be as exciting for you as it is for me, but hey. This is my blog, so you get to read all about it. :p 

My love of photography goes hand in hand with my love for photo editing. If I could, I would spend endless hours sitting here, testing out different colors, brightness and contrast, blur and bloom (adding a glow effect). The fact that I currently take pictures with a point-and-shoot (one with the ability to tweak manual settings, however limited) has created the possibly bad habit of thinking ahead, processing how I might be able to edit the photo to make it look different, what sort of filters I can use with it to give it a high contrast or wistful look, etc. Similarly, I find myself lazily thinking, "I can just edit this photo later instead of trying to find the perfect camera settings at this very second." While this kind of thinking is sometimes okay, it doesn't help in furthering my skills in learning the art of fine tuning my settings or discovering what settings bring out my "signature look", so to speak. In my mind I have a "signature look", a color scheme and way I want my pictures to look. As time goes on, I really hope to be able to capture that look more from the raw picture itself than from editing. But I know that editing will always be part of the process. 

Less talking, more pic posting, right?! So, a friend from church recently told me about a photo editing program called PhotoScape. It's completely free, so I definitely recommend checking it out. I am IN LOVE with it. Like a kid at Christmas. Like a fat kid loves cake. A gigantic, delectable, melt-in-your-mouth piece of chocolate cake smothered in the best free filters and color settings I have seen yet. Last week, my wonderful photographer friend Katie did a shoot for us at Inniswoods and got some AWESOME photos. Because she knows me so well and knew what joy I would find in editing them, she gave me the raw jpgs straight out of the camera! THANK YOU KATIE! I don't want to share all of the photos quite yet because they are mostly for Christmas stuff (you will see them all eventually!), but I do want to share one of my faves of Audrey. A before and after editing. I LOVE this stuff! HEART FLUTTERS! Click for big versions! 

The original

My favorite edited version so far - I've done a few. My beautiful girl!

That's all for now. Peace!