Theme Thursday: Before and After

The Mom Crowd blog had shared this photography blog, The Land of K.A., and I’m starting to start participate in her Theme Thursdays. This Thursday’s theme: BEFORE and AFTER!

I love seeing Before and After photos. I love knowing that other photographers can have the same exposure and lighting problems as me. It gives me hope in my own developing skills.

BEFORE

Using GIMP, here are some steps I did to improve the photo:

1. Auto adjusted the white balance.

2. Selected the porch and:
- adjusted the color balance to more red by 10, and
- using the hue/saturation tool, I set lightness to -10 and boost up the saturation to +20.

3. Selected various clothes on my daughter and adjusted the hue/saturation:
- Shirt was saturate boosted to +30,
- Jeans saturate boosted to +20, and
- Hat had lightness adjusted to -10 and saturation boosted to +20.

4. I selected her skin and color balanced by adjusting towards red by 10 and saturation to +10.

5. I used the freeform selection tool to select the eyes. I dodged the whites of her eyes and slightly color balanced them (they were a bit too blue, so I moved the slider towards yellow by 10). The dodge tool opacity was set to 33%.

Then I selected the pupils and dodged them as well. (At the same opacity level.)

6. Cropped it and viola DONE!

(Click on photo for a larger version.)

I’m sure I could have done more but that’s where my post-processing skills are at this time.
:)

What do you think?

(Note: I originally posted this on Monday thinking it was for LAST Thursday. I’ve edited and change the post date to the correct date! :) )