For my photography friends out there, how often do you go back and re-edit old photos? I will occasionally go back and play with one of Daphne’s baby pictures, now that I’m better at Photoshop. When Daphne was a baby we shot with my old Canon point & shoot, and our Nikon D50 in an automatic mode. Hehehe. For those of you with a dslr, please do yourself a favor and get out of Auto or any of the priority modes. I’m not saying my photos now are great, but I do think I saw a big improvement in my photos as soon as I started to shoot in Manual.

This pic of Daphne was taken in our cave of a living room in B’ham, with my Canon. Argh. Horrible. And to make it worse, I think I actually edited this one in Lightroom. See the vignette? What is it about new photographers and the vignette? I totally abused those when I first started to learn photo editing. I’m getting better.

Daphne at 4 months old. Her first pigtails! And here’s a very quick re-edit:

I still have some work to do, but at least the exposure is better. And I did a little color correcting (how did she end up with Fremen eyes in the original?). And for the most part, I am not of fan of heavily edited eyes. You know what I’m talking about… the photos you see where the eyes have been brightened and sharpened so much they don’t look real. I wanted to lighten her eyes just a touch, so you could see the funky sectoral heterochromia thing she had going on in her eyes at the time. And I also took out some of the pigtail shadows, but still need to work on that area. I wish I would have kept the original SOOC photo. My digital asset management sucks.

But it’s a start, right? We’ve taken thousands of pictures of Daphne, but have printed just a handful. I need to go back and edit our favorites from the last 2 years and get them in a photo album!