Need advice on touching up photos

I like the doggy and the dude's statue the most, they have a lil personality to 'em. The only thing I see wrong with the horses is a little pixelation on their bellies in the edit.

One thing you wanna do is make sure that nothing is competing with the object of attention. The statue of that aristocrat (i think?) stands out a little more in the first, but in the edit the grass competes with it and the eye just decides to pull away from the image.

I have a canon rebel xt, nice camera though better ones are out there yup yup, and the first thing to learn and dominate is playing with the aperture and shutter speed of the camera, (if you can manually do it, then better). If you know about it you can freeze or blur moving objects, allow more or less light in to do so, etc... Also, getting the right angle and moment helps. I think the horse statue picture is pretty good, just wonder if it would have been better to freeze the water or blur it in motion, who knows.

Ooooooooooo! Do you know about clone stamping in photoshop? It's a sneaky lil technique you use to mask stuff up in pictures. Example! Take your first picture and open in photoshop. Click on the clone stamp icon in the tools bar, or hotkey S. Hold "alt" and click on the part of the picture you wanna copy, then let go of alt and just "paint" with the stamp over the place to paste. Try it out with the sky and that building in the first if you want completely get rid of it. Just be careful with patterns.

The fish picture could have been a reeeeeally good example of a concept in design called irregularity in pattern, where that fish with yellow colors breaks the pattern of all the other blue fish. Just one thing, the golden rule or ratio sort of divides that image rectangle into about 4 parts, so that fish would be placed in the middle of one of those but a little closer to the middle of the whole thing.... hehe lots of design crap going on all the time

Well these are all just tidbits of info that you might know. Have fun most of all, yup yup.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Wow, I need more posts before posting URLs or images. ok...?

Anywho... For the horses you can use the dodge and burn tools in order to bring out the bright and dark colors. You can do the same with your pirate or you can go using the magnetic lasso tool and loop it around him, thus you'd only end up editing whatever's inside the lasso (him) and not outside

Ok ok, I decided to show you an example using your pirate's picture!

The first attachment is your original, and the second is my edit. Can you do me a favor and post both pics up in the thread since the background is dark? Thanks.

First, I used the magnetic lasso tool and revolved it around the pirate. I adjusted the levels to increase the contrast because this is the figure of attention plus he's in the foreground. Then I saved the selection into a new channel so that I can just use the magic wand tool with that channel active, which lets me reselect the whole outline without having to redo the lasso thingy

Ok, then I copied the layer and made a new one. I gave that new one a vector mask and I gaussian-blurred the top layer to about 2.7. Then I "erased" the pirate in that mask layer so that the blur wouldn't apply to the pirate. Then to further increase focus on the pirate, I reduced saturation on the top layer (which shows the background) to -47 or so.

Then I wanted to touch up the pirate himself because he looked a little too dark. So I applied the dodge tool with a fuzzy brush to about 50% exposure on the highlights to bring out the "gold" in the buttons and the tendons on the bronze skin and such. Right now I'm just kinda concerned with the white sky (that's the issue now......... clone stamping! )

However in the end... it's all up to your taste, babe

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Yup! And once you go into this, you enter the world of lenses. In this case's example, a tele-lens (sp)... which you can use to get really cool zoom-in pictures of insects and whatnot. One thing I do with such pictures, and others of course, is to try and play with color schemes to make everything more harmonious and can really juice up images.

You can check articles online or in magazines about how to correctly play with aperture and shutter speeds to get the right image... whole worlds just about it really.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.