Just a Swingin’ – The Edit

So last week, I posted some photos of my daughter, Kelsey, that I took at my photography class. I encouraged my readers to look through the unedited version of the photos and pick their favorite. And the winner was, this one:

13_Feb_swing before editing_009_edit
13_Feb_swing before editing_009_edit

Here are the settings from the original photo: ISO 400, 200mm, f/5.6, 1/160 sec

Then I pulled the photo into Lightroom 4 (which I am loving by the way!) and did a little bit of editing:

image
image

In addition to these settings, I also did a skin softening on her face and a post-crop vignetting in the amount of –24. Now I am still learning the edit part of photos, because I really never thought it was necessary. Since taking these couple of classes, I am now able to see that even just a little bit of editing can make a big difference in my photos.

So again, here is the before:

13_Feb_swing before editing_009_edit
13_Feb_swing before editing_009_edit

And here is the after:

13_Feb_swing_001_edit
13_Feb_swing_001_edit

Now if someone had moved her hair away from across her eyes, that would have been helpful! But I am not by any means at expert at Photoshop Elements yet, so I am not even going to attempt to edit those away!

So what do you think? Does it help to see the screenshot of what I did in Lightroom?