Before & After Blog Hop

So, I thought I'd enter the "Before & After Blog Hop" that Monica at Pixel Perfect has so graciously done. The idea is to post a picture straight out of the camera, and then your "fix", explaining how you touched it up. I'm not going to be very thorough here, because I don't remember all the steps I took to fix this shot. I was editing in Photoshop Elements, the most basic kind of equipment for digital editing!

Here is the shot, straight out of the camera:

My goodness, the laundry list of things wrong! I was shooting a "Birthday Smash Session" for a one year old, which allows them to just annihilate a cake while I happily shoot away. Well little Madelyn took off straight for me, and her dad stepped in to help wrangle her. I was using natural light from a sliding glass door, and just happened to be tweaking the setting on my camera when she did this. She had this cute, naughty "I'm gonna get you" look on her face, so I just snapped it!

My solution to fix it included the "Magic Extractor" tool to take away dad's hands and rubber stamp in the backdrop. I also heavily tweaked the white balance, the brightness, clarity and tone to end up with this shot:

I guess the key to being a learn-as-you-go photographer is learn how to use the processing tools on your software of choice, because they may end up saving a shot that would be a lost cause.