Linda From Maine Loc: Yakima, Washington

Thank you all so much for getting this topic off to a great start.

One comment I identified with is Jim-Pops' "Never sure when to stop" You'll see why below:

Ducks and swans. With so much action, a lot of the photos I got were misses. My first creation used Topaz Simplify Buzsim b&w, Nik Glamour Glow and High Key filters. Then I tried a "stained glass" (from PS Elements filters) effect on another image that I blended with the #2 (more cropping) via soft light blend mode, and added an overlay to change the water to blue. #3 makes me smile, but I don't think I'll be putting it on my wall

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RichardTaylor Loc: Sydney, Australia

That is a good recovery.

RichardTaylor Loc: Sydney, Australia

It all depends on what you are trying to achieve.

Linda From Maine Loc: Yakima, Washington

I admire those who have a firm idea of where they want to go and how to get there

srt101fan

I'm still paddling around the post-processing pool with water wings... not really sure where I want to go; definitely not sure how to get there!

Linda From Maine Loc: Yakima, Washington

As long as you are having fun in the kiddie pool, that's what is important

But you know from topics here and elsewhere on UHH, there are folks standing by, ready and willing to walk you through specific processes.

minniev Loc: MIssissippi

Experimentation is a great teacher. And yes, Linda is right, there are folks on UHH very willing to help. If you see something you want to learn, ask, and the OP will usually walk you through it. I learned just about everything I do right here.

minniev Loc: MIssissippi

Love those stained glass ducks and am hoping to find some to photograph

Linda From Maine Loc: Yakima, Washington

LOL, they are a very rare breed. I was lucky to spot them!

Jim-Pops Loc: Granbury, Texas

I asked Minniev is it would be Ok to edit her picture of Havana and she gave me here blessing. When I first saw Minniev's picture I thought about all the bright colors when we think of Cuba. I visualized her picture in a more conventional edit with strong colors. I first straighted her picture while keeping the children in the picture. To do that I had to add some area to the lower right corner. I added a more dramatic sky using Lumina 4's sky replacement, but used it in conjunction with one of my previously saved skies. I then took the picture to Aurora HDR and made a one image HDR.
Back to Photoshop for some minor contrast and curve adjustments.

There is nothing wrong with Minnniev's edit just want to help show how much you can change the impact of ones picture with various edits. In this case you could favor artistic or conventional or somewhere in-between.

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minniev Loc: MIssissippi

Thanks for doing/sharing! Yes, indeed. Artistic is only one of the options you can use to make a silk purse from your pig-ear. There's many options, from changing sky or background, to changing light, to enhancing or removing detail, altering colors, converting to monochrome (one of my favorites for high contrast images).

Here's another kind of fix-it effort: straight repair. You shoot a subject that has horrible intrusion by objects you can't avoid either because there is no other angle or because the subject is gone by the time you get there. With birds either or both is possible. I shot this yesterday with full intent to delete because my only interest was using my long lens to figure out whether these egrets had their breeding colors yet (green masks on their beaks). But I decided I'd spend a few minutes and try to turn it into a 'real' image for this thread. It ain't great but it is passable fair. Added a texture to help cover the flaws, but am posting the original, the repaired version, and the artistic version.

So, saying all this to encourage ya'll to try a "fixit" of one of your images that is destroyed by intrusions, and share it here!

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RichardTaylor Loc: Sydney, Australia

What software are you using.
I use Lightroom for my initial edits and may be able to help, although similar principals apply with other software.

Jim-Pops Loc: Granbury, Texas

No Joke Minniev your Bird& Treen editing to remove all the wires is one of the very best I'v seen, congratulations on a job expertly done. I looked hard for some flaws and found none.👏

kenievans Loc: Dallas

I often go back to photos that I took when I was first learning photography to see what I can do to improve them or get creative with them in post processing. I took this photo in Oct of 2017, not quite a year after I had gotten my camera. The sun was almost completely set and back lighting the bird and tree stumps. There was a slight pink tint to the water reflecting the still colorful sky. My foreground was out of focus and the background was just plain ugly from the shadows made by the ripples in the water. I was working on understanding negative space and thought this could have potential.

I cropped out everything except the bird and a few stumps.

In Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) I pushed the whites, the blacks, and the shadows until the water was white and the stumps with their rippling shadows were black.

In Photoshop I made a duplicate layer then added a mask to remove some of the smaller stumps and other things that were distracting. I also did some dodging on the bird to bring out more of the detail as well as increasing the canvas on the right hand side to add more negative space and give it balance.

The last step was to apply a black and white adjustment to take out any bit of color that was showing in the stump shadows.

There you go, from trash to treasure in a few short steps.

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RichardTaylor Loc: Sydney, Australia

I like the graphic nature of the final result.