Fix It Friday & My Lightroom Edits

There are so many fun contests, photo sharing opportunities and chances for learning about photography because of the internet. Things like Sweet Shot Tuesday and the weekly I Heart Faces challenges are some of them.

I Heart Faces also hosts something called Fix It Friday. Basically, they supply a photo for the participants to download, and then everyone works their own edits on the same photo. Then, we all share what we came up with! I have stopped over and seen the work people have done before, but I haven't submitted my edits, until now.

Here was the original photo that was supplied for download:



This is my first color edit. I'll list the things I adjusted below.



I used Lightroom only to do this edit. [I LOVEEEE Lightroom. It's my one stop shop for about 99.99% of my photo edits.]

In LR, I adjusted the:
Exposure up.
Brightness up.
Warmed up the White Balance.
Added a little Fill Light.
Increased the Sharpness just a tad.
And ran a high contrast adjustment brush over the eyes.

They are all tiny little tweaks of the sliders, and literally take 30 seconds or less.

Here is my black and white edit:



This B&W conversion is done with a preset I made in Lightroom. Isn't that awesome - Lightroom makes creating presets [the Actions of Lightroom] SO EASY.

I made the preset by making a photo grayscale, then adjusting the brightness, contrast, tonal curve etc, until I liked the look. Then I saved the edits as a preset. I use it all the time, and just adjust the brightness etc for each individual photo I'm working on.

This challenge is pretty fun because it's nice to see what other people do with the same photo. Each person really does have their own vision and their own style. That's what makes photography so interesting!

Head on over the I Heart Faces to see the other edits!

xo,
Laura