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Nancy and Tom Lea came over to Portland for the weekend. Tom is a retired professional photographer so I like to pick his brain when we get together. A while back I purchased Adobe Photoshop Elements Editor from the Apple App Store. It’s hella complicated and I gave up on it after a bit. But Tom uses it quite a bit and showed me how to get a lot of use of it pretty easily.

Here are three versions of the same picture. I took this picture of a hamburger at Dea’s In & Out with my Canon PowerShot S100 back in January. I made the mistake of not resetting the white balance after taking pictures in the house. I had the WB set for tungsten lighting but the lighting at the restaurant was flourescent. Here’s the original photo

Original photo; lots of blue tints

I edited the file with Aperture, working on the color, shadows and highlights, as well as blurring Jay’s hand in the background.

After adjustments with Aperture

Much better I think; the french fries that I really wanted to capture look crispier; like they really did at the restaurant. Jay’s hand and the receipt just to the left of the burger have been blurred a bit.

Then I used Adobe Photoshop Elements

I especially like two features of Adobe Photoshop Elements.

1. The ability to identify something white (or black or gray) on the photo; click on it and adjustment is made to the whole picture
2. The ability to select a part of the photo and then blur the selection, Or, invert the selection and blur everything not in the selection. 

Oh, wow. I just noticed that the Elements version transferred back to Aperture is quite a bit smaller. I’ll have to figure that out. I just tried a new way of saving (Export from Aperture instead of drag-and-drop). Here is the result (with just a bit of editing; not a lot of work)