Retouching Photographs

I've started playing around with Photoshop to enhance my photos.

I was looking at the wedding photos done by the professional they hired for my cousin's wedding. They were fantastic. You can view them here: Kellie and Paul's Wedding. Her composition is excellent, the pictures are sharp, and she certainly gets a great sense of playfulness from her subjects.

There's also a lot of post-processing in her photos. I don't know everything she's doing, but I can that there are adjustments to color and saturation for starters.

I decided to play around with some of my existing photos to see if I could breathe some life into them.

I experimented with curves, an unsharp mask, and vignetting in Photoshop to alter the image below.

Here's the original (You definitely want to zoom in to the photo. It looks a lot better close-up):

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I went to "curves" in Photoshop and modified the red and green channels to have a slight "s" curve. I left the blue channel as it was. I then applied an unsharp mask to the image. I aimed for a radius of 50 on the unsharp mask and played with the other settings so that it wasn't too severe. Next, I added a filter of an "inner glow" and changed the color to black. That gave it a soft vignette.

When I look at the after photo, I start thinking that I didn't too that much, but when I go back to the original, I see how washed-out the original now appears.

Here's the final image:

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Let me know what you think.