Week 38 good to WOW edit Fall

So it is time for Thursday edits for Good to Wow (actually a little past time.)  I did play with a few features of LightRoom, and I must say it is hard not to love Lightroom.  It is taking a little bit of time to adjust to using adjustment brushes for everything instead of layer masks, and for some things I just have better understanding and control in PSE, but LR is cool!  Especially since my Photoshop is Elements 6 so the ease of syncing photos in LR is a huge time saver. 

So here are my puzzle edits.  On all three I did the LR presets General Punch and Flat Tone, so I should/could have synced, but I also did a Lens Correction vertical but only on two of them.  On the one with the streak of light I also raised my blacks a tad in order to cause the shadows to be even darker.  Here one of the original so you can best see how changing the vertical under manual lens correction to -48 with constrain crop checked changed the perspective of the puzzle.

After making my edits I made a collage in LR using one of the print layouts in order to make sharing them more interesting--presentation.  I hadn't cropped the darker one to be horizontal, but liked how it worked in the collage better.  The top shadows were actually not that important to the image. 

You can see my other originals here, including my last one.  On my photo of my friend, I'm not sure it would be correct to say it was overexposed since the exposure on my friend was about right, but the background had certainly lost a lot of color.  So aside from my normal two presets, dialing down the clarity, I used adjustment brushes to soften her skin a little and then all over the background to take down the exposure and brightness, take up the saturation, I tweaked that brush until I don't remember what exactly but I was satisfied.  In the lower right corner I also added blue to the brush, but couldn't quite get what I wanted, still here are those results:

Then for fun I converted to BW using the LR preset "Green Filter" and added a frame per a tutorial I found while watching the tutorials Ashley linked--you basically bring all the sliders in Post-Crop Vignetting all the way to the left for a black frame.

It was interesting to try out different BW presets to see which one emphasized details and which ones totally washed this photo out, but I really need to explore how to make my own black and whites.  I'm betting it would be a lot faster :)

So check out the other Fall edits over at Ashley's blog.  I've already peeked at a few, and they are good!