FOTO FIND FRIDAY - BEFORE & AFTER

It's Foto Find Friday and the theme this week is "Before & After." Everyone knows that I kind of have of a 'love-hate' relationship with photoshop. I love the final edits it produces but the time and the non user-friendly approach to the software program is less then desirable in the grand scheme of things. However, in recent months, after an umpteen amount of classes (and one still yet to begin come Oct. 19th), I am finally finding my inner peace when navigating thru photoshop. It no longer makes me cringe as bad as it once did when I log into there. For that means...I am making progress friends. :)
So this week, even though I don't typically care for textures and such on portrait style photos, I thought I'd take a dreary photo of an old red fire truck and spruce it up a bit. I don't mind textures on images like this but for some reason I am not as fond of a texture in the background when the image is of a human being. I'm learning that part of my personal style is clear and crisp images rather then texturized and done up with post edit art from photoshop. Again though, I find that I run across certain non-people images here and there that have no umph. Sort of like the before shot of the red fire truck below. However, with my new "bestie" (a.k.a. photoshop), we are able to go in and give that red truck a bit more spunk and add some character to the image overall. See the before and after shot below...

Above is the "before photoshop" shot and below is the "after photoshop" image...

Needless to say, I like the old, grunged out, retro feel of the the "after" image. Fun stuff. So...if you have any images that you've done a before and after edit on, feel free to share them this week. We'd love to see the magic that went into a fun or favorite photo of yours. And for those who will ask, on my after shot of the truck above, I sharpened it, added clarification, played with my curves a hair, used like three different actions on it, and then added a texture to it all at the end. It sounds like a long drawn out process but it was actually pretty quick and painless.

If you'd like to participate in the foto find Friday "before & after" theme this week, please blog a post on your own blog that has pictures pertaining to images that came out of your camera looking one way but then you did some post editing or some correcting via photoshop or another software program that helped spruce up the original image. Also, please make sure that you mention and link back to this AGD blog when you place the post on your own blog. We need you to make sure your link takes us directly to that specific post for this weeks theme (and not your blog home page). Also, please make sure that your post includes the info that links back to AGD. If those two things are not there, your link will unfortunately be deleted and you'll have to re-post it the requested way. We are looking forward to seeing your submissions. Have fun with it! ☮ & ♥, Angie