I thought I would show a before and after shot for everyone to see how I post processed an image. This is just a snapshot of my monkey #2 & #4. I loved the image, it was the first day of monkey #3′s baseball practice and it was windy at the field. They were snuggling to keep warm. I just wanted to enhance it a bit and put my signature editing style on it.

I pulled the RAW file into ACR and brought the contrast down to zero. I do this with every image so I can start fresh since I add my own contrast in CS5. I also bumped the blacks, added a bit of fill light and pulled some of the yellow out of the girls skin. The white balance and exposure was pretty good on this image to begin with so only minor adjustments were needed in ACR. I try to get as much correct in camera as possible.

Next I brought it into photoshop. I cloned out the flip flops & baseball gloves. I warmed up the image just a tad. Next I ran an action on it that I made that is my basic workflow for all my images. The action adds a soft light layer set at about 30%, a midtone bump at about 30% masked off the background, a levels adjustment set to about 20% & contrast adjustment layer set to about 25%. Many of my images have a pink or peachy haze added to them also that is a part of my editing style. This is also part of my basic workflow action. I created a solid fill layer with a light pink color that is set to anywhere between 4~15% depending on the image.

Lastly I used Michelle Kanes eye sparkle action on a very low opacity and that was it. You can see these are subtle changes and adjustments but adds a polished look to a snapshot.

{ SOOC= Straight out of camera }