T i f f a n y H s u

I am seriously obsessed with photo editing tutorials.  I can waste a good part of my day watching tutorials and trying what I learned on photos.  I've even started to take bad photos online and trying to "fix" them based on what I learned.  Since those photos are not my property and I have no right to edit them, I won't post them here, but I will post this one from my own photo collection.

This was taken on a backwater cruise in Kerala.  I originally just increased contrast and saturation, which ended up with a photo that "popped" but mainly because the shadows were flooded with black.


The after is the result of curves, levels, gradient masks, and a little bit of added light, wow, what a difference!  This was the "pop" I was looking for without muddying up the photo with black contrast.




I played with increasing the color saturation in the water reflection, but I was starting to border "not so realistic" territory.