Photomanipulation

 Before

 After

For this outdoor picture of a wheelbarrow I took the picture and immediately was bugged with how blown out the sky was.  My goal for post-production tweaks was to try and fix this however with how badly it was illuminated by the sun I able to do so without it looking ridiculous.  So moving on with the rest of the picture I upped the blacks and actually lowered the whites a little bit using curves.  This brought out more contrast on the concrete and in the log pile, along with on the wheelbarrow and most of all in the trees.  I then went into color balance and further boosted the red to make the wheel barrel pop out, upped the greens to make the trees stand out more and have a more full green color.  And lastly I upped the blues just a tiny bit which added to the contrasting dark spots a little bit more.  I then cropped it a bit to get rid of some not needed details and still retain the rule of thirds.

Before

After

This picture of a black mop on the ground is actually in fact a  photo of a dog resting in it's natural habitat. When I first took the picture I didn't really notice but once seeing it enlarged on my computer screen I realized just how orange it seemed.  Even though the lights in my living room are tungsten lights I was still surprised and annoyed with how orange it looked, also how dark Rizti's face looked was something I wanted to change in post.  The very first alteration I did with the picture was remove the small black dot next to my dog's stomach on the carpet because it was pretty annoying to look at when the picture was enlarged on my monitor.  I then went about adjusting settings with what I wanted to change in mind, I first lowered the blacks a bit and then upped the whites to try and bring out any detail my camera picked up but wasn't originally visible.  This helped put a lot of detail back on my dogs face and other dark parts however there still was that orange look to the picture.  I lowered the reds the most out of any other color changes which helped with the orange tint.  Lowered the greens a touch as there were no greens in the picture this just brought out other colors more.  And lastly raised the blues a touch just to help bring out some more contrast.  I then cropped the picture down a bit in order to be more centric about the subject but still wanted to keep the cool bokeh-esque light coming through the coffee table in the background, and called it done.  I would've liked to get more detail on the face but I think to do this I would've needed better front lighting while taking the picture.