My little man and some editing tips.

This last week I found myself getting sentimental every time Lyndon and I were out together. You see, my favorite little buddy, Lyndon, starts kindergarten this Fall. That means that I only have a handful of days left to spend shopping, going out to lunch, and meeting friends at the park with him. (sigh.) I love driving around town, listening to his adorable speech impediment from the back seat, "Hey Mom", he usually starts, " guess what? I sure love you." He melts my heart. Fall is coming way too fast.

On a whim, several weeks ago, I took some impromptu pictures of him during a much needed Texas rainstorm. I let him be his happy-go-lucky self while I snapped away. Here are a few... AND a Lightroom tutorial about how to give a ho-hum picture some pizzaz! (scroll on down)

Now for the editing tips...

learn how to go from this:

...to this (in just 4 easy steps!):

Here are the steps I took in Lightroom:
1- I cropped the photo so that the focus of the picture would be directly on the subject.
2- Then because I felt like the picture looked too drab, I increased the exposure to +28 and the brightness to +13. (increasing the brightness, as opposed to increasing the exposure even more, gives me the ability to make the picture brighter without over exposing the the highlights.)
3- Even with the exposure and brightness increase, his eyes still looked too drab. So I used the brushes and zoomed into the eyes to increased the exposure just on his eyes.
4- And to finish it off, because I felt like I still needed something to pull my eyes toward the subject, I added a "post-crop vignette" with these values-- Amount: -20; Midpoint: 59; Roundness: +20; Feather: 51.


So don't throw out your ho-hum photos right away...you just might be able to save it. Have a great week!