Ahh, a little trip down memory lane :) and some editing along the way!

All these pics were taken by my dad when I was around 6 or 7 years old... obviously I have no idea what digital camera he used as it was 9 or 10 years ago now but its a good start for simple editing. Here goes!

Ok so this first one is me looking around a tree in my grandparent's garden - I can't remember why I'm looking scared here. To edit this, first I touched up the brightness and contrast to make it a bit less dull. I then ran a burn tool brush over my hair (set at a low-exposure and mainly targeting the shadows) to bring out the redness of it (the bottom picture - the finished one - shows the true natural colour of my hair lol).

I also burned the tree (same setting) to bring out the green more and make the variation of tones slightly more prominent.

Before

After

Here, I can only assume my mum's camera was used, as my twin sis (on the sofa - and yes, we look different) is holding Dad's. Again, I have no idea what make the camera used was, but the resolution's fairly low. It's easier to crop images when the resolution's higher as you have more pixels to play with - as you may be able to see, this low-resolution shot has gone fairly pixelly. The original image is quite a bit wider so I cropped it to focus on us.

Original 

Edited

So, the (very bad) editing. Again, brightness and contrast at first, then I used the variations tool to lower the redness a bit. I then burned my hair darker and used the paint tool (red, with a very low opacity) to bring the colour of it back, which had been lost in the process.

Anyways, all the editing I used here was done on Adobe Photoshop CS4, which I use for all my images. It's pretty easy to use and is (in my opinion) very good!! Main things I have used here:

 - burn tool to make things darker, concentrating on specifics like highlights or shadows;

 - brightness and contrast (this, along with levels and curves in Photoshop, provide basic editing and is often

   all that is needed to improve an image);

 - crop, which gets rid of unwanted background (but can make a picture pixelly - make sure the image has as

   high a resolution as possible);

 - paint, which when used at a low opacity can enhance a colour;

 - variations (this adds extra blue/cyan/red/green/yellow/magenta to the whole of the image, and you can set it  

   to different strengths).

The next post will contain images I actually took myself :P