Yesterday Kim and I hosted one of our Fresh Camera Classes and had so much fun! We love teaching this class and the women we had there yesterday were awesome.

At the end of the class we were talking about editing photos and I said that there are a lot of “professional” photographers out there that use editing to FIX their images instead of just enhancing them. We talked about how if you want to be good at photography you should be able to get the image right IN camera and then use Photoshop or Lightroom or any program to just make tiny edits that help a good photo just look better.

Anyway, last night as I was pulling some images of Carsyn (who I worked with yesterday morning before the class) I thought maybe I should demonstrate to them (and you) what I was talking about.

Here is my SOOC (straight out of camera) image…

And here it is after my editing in LR and PS…

In Lightroom I just did a few minor color changes and in Photoshop I ran a few quick actions from Michelle Kane’s actions sets… “bland to brilliant” but took the opacity way down, “glisten” to sharpen the eyes a bit, “pearly whites” to whiten her teeth a little (at a low opacity)  and “anti-lobster skin” at a super low opacity just to take a little of the orange/red our of her skin. And that’s it.

Could I have done more? Maybe. But does this clean edit need it? I don’t think so! She’s adorable and didn’t need much else. Do I (or Kim) do more to some images?  Yes.  But that’s usually just because we want to get a little artistic or play around a bit more, not because we need to fix anything. Your image should look good right out of your camera. Which is why we challenged our ladies yesterday to shoot every day for a month and NOT edit them at all. Because it’s SO easy to take a photo that’s too dark and just tell yourself it’s fine because you can lighten it up while editing.

Happy shooting to all our Fresh Classers!