Photo Editing

I don't know why I feel the desire to share my opinion/process of editing photos. I actually don't edit my photos. I haven't, that is. The only edited photos on my blog were a couple days ago in this post. I thought I would share here how little I edited these photos. I also think it will be fun to have this list for future reference.

The top photos are the edited ones. All were edited using Adobe Photoshop Express, which I found free in the store on my Windows 8 laptop.

Picture 1:

Looking at these side by side, I can hardly tell the difference. I just tried to make it a little less washed out. 

Picture 2:

I cropped this photo. I think that's it. I took this picture while we were on a boat tour on the Riverwalk in San Antonio because of those two similar angles, but didn't like that the sky awkwardly got in there, so I cropped it out. It looks like I may have played with the shadows a teeny bit, but I can't even tell. 

Picture 3:

I only cropped this one, because I didn't like that those people happened to be in the picture. 

Picture 4:

The first thing I did to this photo was crop it, so it was endless balconies. Then I think I tried to lessen the yellow-ness of the lights, but that was obviously not fixed. Of course, I could try it in black and white, but half the fun is that that is how those balconies looked. (Also, I knew I liked this photo. I uploaded it to 500px.com, a website I'm starting to use to share some of my photography, and it's gotten a lot of comments/like/favorites tonight! You can view it here.)

Picture 5:

This photo is the one I edited the most. I didn't like the yellow look. I ended up just making it black and white. And playing around with some levels. 

Picture 6: 

The main thing I did with this one was straighten it. It really bothered me that the wall looks crooked on the left side, so I fixed it. I also edited it a tad. Maybe. I don't remember now, I did all these Saturday night in the hotel room.

So that's it. I guess my view on photo editing is simple: cropping, straightening, and making it black and white. While I love the coloring on all the hipster photos I reblog on tumblr, that's not my photography style. My style is natural. That's why I shoot in manual. That's why I don't delete any photos, even the ones that I will obviously never use because the settings were wrong. I like to look back on the process it takes to get one photo.

- rl