Week 32 good to WOW Edit Bright and Colorful

This post is taking me longer than usual because my husband bought me Lightroom3 this week (he works at a University so was able to purchase the faculty version at an even bigger discount on Amazon).  I think I'll love it, but there are some things that for now just take longer and I cannot even tell you exactly what I did.

I edited the picture of Sunflower completely in LR, including the sharpen and resize for the web. While I like my better understanding and control of the sharpening in PSE6 more, now that I understand the "publish" and once I set up a few more places I want pictures to go, it will become faster and easier. 

Don't worry if you don't like her skin as much in the edit as the original (viewable via mouseover).  Neither do I.  Since I don't have curves in PSE6 and my ACR is limited, I am still learning curves and sliders.  I liked what the tonal curves did to the rest of the image, but it made her face an unhealthy orange.  I was able to use a brush to bring down the saturation with a mask, but I couldn't quite match the skin that had been there.  It will definitely take some time to gain control in the program.  In PSE6 I would have just masked all the other effects out completely, but I'm trying to use and learn my new program.

In order to do the presentation that Ashley suggested I did have to bring my other photo into PSE.  LR does make that a lot easier than iPhoto ever did (especially since bridge never worked for me at all).

Original:

In Lightroom I used the LR preset General Punch and Sharpen for Narrow Edges.  If I'd been working in PSE I probably would have tried a Pure Pop~a levels adjustment and a High Pass Overlay.  I think the results would have been similar.  Actually, I just tried it.  I had to reduce the Pure Pop and the Overlay to make the same subtle edits.  I liked the stronger edges in the High Pass Sharpening, but PSE was not necessary.

Except to put it in the photo into the color swatch template.

Then I resized and sharpened for the web in PSE since I was already there and I was working on a image that isn't located in a permanent LR3 folder yet (it is still in iPhoto; it's gonna take some major work to export them to a new file system that will retain the folder names.)

There you have it~this weeks shoot and edit.  Be sure to check out the other edits, too!