I had a senior session last weekend with my coworker’s son. It was an amazing day, and we met in my favorite spot in downtown Minneapolis.

It was magic light.

Before:

After:

I adjusted the white balance, added lens flare in post and sharpened it.

And even though I typically don’t do this, the b&w option …

Shot with a Canon 5D + 85mm 1.8. Edited in Photoshop CS3.

Before & After is a Pixel Perfect blog hop.

Before:

After:

Oh, I did a lot.

Here’s what I did: rotated the straighten the horizon. Fixed the White Balance (baby was way too blue). Changing the WB made the house color off, so I used the hue/saturation layer to “blue” back up the background. I did this by using the dropper to click on the color I wanted to change (in this case the house siding). I think used the hue slider till the siding was back to the blue I wanted it. I then used a layer mask to apply it only to the background. Used the healing tool to remove the reflection from the bucket. Sharpened.

Shot with Canon 5d + 85mm 1.8.

For more before and afters, check out Pixel Perfect!

So I had this whole entry with examples on how to remove a color cast, but when I put my edited version up against the original, I realized I didn’t like my edit! (Hate that!) I like it on it’s own, but not next to the SOOC. Crazy, I know.

So I went deep into my archives for a straight-out-of-camera shot that might be fun to play with.

Before:

After:

The first thing I had to do was get rid of all that grain! This image was shot with my old Rebel XT indoors at 1600 ISO, so it was very noisy. I ran a noise reduction filter, and also played with the blur tool to get rid of some of the grain.

Then I ran Pioneer Woman’s Fresh & Colorful action — which is a soft light layer (that I reduced to 50%), a screen layer (reduced to 25%) and a saturation layer (reduced to 25%).

I felt like the flower had too much yellow in it, so I opened a selective color layer to take out some yellow. (Always use selective color vs hue/saturation when you’re looking to remove a certain color from your image, like if you’re working to remove color casts.)

I also saturated the reds and played with the hue/saturation sliders in the other colors till I got it where I wanted it. I removed a few smudges thanks to a dirty sensor, ran unsharp mask and resized it for the web. Easy peasy!

Any requests for specific how-to editing tutorials? Let me know what questions you have, and I’ll see if I have any before/afters to match!

Want to see more Before & Afters? Head over to Pixel Perfect!

For this week’s Pixel Perfect Before & After blog hop, I thought I’d show you that when you get it right in camera, there is little processing that needs to be done!

Before:

After:

Shot in RAW with a Canon 5d + 50mm 1.4. Edited with Photoshop CS3.

I simply bumped up the exposure a tad (in Adobe Camera RAW), color corrected, cropped and sharpened.

For more before & afters, head over to Pixel Perfect!

Before:

After:

Shot with my Canon 5D + 85mm 1.8. Edited in Photoshop CS3.

(I posted the black and white version of this edit on the entry where I posted more pictures from this wedding if you want to check them out!)

Want to see more before & afters? Head over to Monica’s blog hop on Pixel Perfect.