Life Signatures

I took this photo at Garret Music Academy and I sent it to Laura at Dolce Pics and now it’s this week’s photo for What’s Your Play? I’m excited!

I figured since it’s my photo, I better play this week!

The SOOC ~

The after ~ for some reason Laura always makes me want to get edgy.

I can’t wait to see the other plays…Danny, will you consider playing this week?

What’s your play by Laura at Dolce Pics.

The before. It’s a beautiful photo. I almost didn’t want to mess with it.

I thought it would be dreamy with less color. And I love the bokeh. I want your camera.

See what others have done at Dolce Pics.

I was thrilled when I won the Aurora software from iheartfaces. Thank you ladies! I finally downloaded it last night and started playing immediately.

Here’s the before.

And here is the after using Aurora.

Disclaimer: I’m not a professional photographer. It took me two years to learn how to crop a picture in photoshop.

The bad: (Please know that this is tough for me. I don’t like to critique anything. I have this really immature need to be liked by everyone. I don’t know why I started a blog and started writing all kinds of things that leave me vulnerable to criticism. But I was asked for my opinion:))
1) The workflow is not at all user friendly. I downloaded the above photo from iheartfaces on to my desktop and I couldn’t figure out how to open it in Aurora from my desktop. Is it just me? I wasted a lot of time trying to figure it out, then finally I just save the photo to a file in my Pictures directory and retrieved it from there.
2) I could only work on one photo at a time. This may not be a deterrent for someone but I’m a multi tasker. It drives me batty.
3) Every time you want to retrieve another photo, you have to close out the application? I don’t think this is a plus.
4) It’s really slow. I have a 3G ram computer with dual core and all that. Am I too impatient?
5) I can’t “spot” edit. I don’t always want to apply an edit to the entire photo.
6) I saw that some of the contributors at iheartfaces use both this and photoshop. Well, that’s for the birds. I want to use just one.

The good: (whew I’m glad the above is done.)
1) It’s really intuitive. Very easy to learn. I think I learned everything about it in about 15 minutes. I’ve been using photoshop for a few years and only know about 10% of it’s capabilities.
2) I really like that Auto Relight function.
3) I love the black/white and sepia toned functions. One click to both, I like that. When in combination with the “Crispr” function, I think you can really edit a monochrome photo pretty effectively.
4) For the novice photo-editor I think this is a great app. It’s hard for to go back after using photoshop…I love photoshop.

So that’s it in a nutshell. I’m not sure that I would have purchased this knowing what I know now especially in light of the fact that there are some other editing software out there that is free. It’s just my opinion. Please don’t hate me.