Welcome to Tutorial Tuesday! Sarah of Naptime Momtog and I will be bringing you a new challenge every week, to stretch your shooting and editing skills. This week, I’m lacking tutorial inspiration. Granted, I was a bit distracted/busy last week between Felicity and my grandmother’s death…but I’ve been lacking tutorial inspiration for a while. Sarah and I have talked before about shutting down Tutorial Tuesday. For whatever reason, we decided against it…until now. Considering our current commitment and participation level, we think it best to end Tutorial Tuesday at the end of this month (unless of course you BEG us to continue…in which case we need helping pulling together some new tutorials). There’s always a chance that I’ll continue posting tutorials on a less formal basis (ya know, once I get my act together as a new mom). Until then, we want to thank all of you who have participated with us over the past eight months.

With that in mind, I thought this week we could keep it simple by sharing our clean edits. If you also have a tutorial you want to share with us, feel free to link that up. Here’s my SOOC image taken last night while Felicity was enjoying a pacifier.

The afternoon light in our house was quickly fading. I had to dial my ISO up to 1000 just to capture this much (I guess I could have gone even higher) without pulling out my flash. Granted, it’s just a snapshot, but there’s no reason why it couldn’t be cleaned up to create something a little more special. So, I made some quick adjustments in Lightroom before exporting to Photoshop. And let me say this…I could have made 100% of my adjustments in Lightroom and be done; however, I am a Photoshop junkie and have a really hard time leaving anything alone. Here are my adjustments:

In Lightroom, I have a ton of presets. However, I’ve found that I often prefer to make adjustments manually. You can see by the screenshot above that I created a custom white balance (using the white of the blanket), increased the exposure, decreased the contrast and added highlights, shadows, whites and blacks. Here’s what my basic adjustments look like:

I probably could have done even more in Lightroom, but I knew I was going to boost, brighten and fine tune my edit in Photoshop using the Coffeeshop Blog’s Perfect Portrait 3. I’ve learned that if I overdo it in my initial editing work, PP3 becomes too much (and yes, I realize that if I just did it right in LR, that I wouldn’t even have to use PS). Here’s my clean edit using PP3.

Subtle but better, right? I use this action on nearly every one of my photos. I could leave my photos alone after running the action, but I don’t. Yesterday, I decided to apply “Miracles” by Paint the Moon for a little extra something. What do you think?

And for one final look at where we’ve been…on the left you see my original SOOC image…on the right, my final edit.

Ready to join in the fun? Here’s how to do it:

1. Read through today’s tutorial.

2. Choose your favorite shot (or more!) to share with us.

3. Don’t forget to grab the button for your post.

4. Link up between now and next Monday.

<a href=”http://sarahhalstead.com/tag/Tutorial-Tuesday” target=”_blank” title=”Tutorial Tuesday”><img alt=”Tutorial Tuesday” src=”http://naptimemomtog.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/tt3.jpg” width=”150″ /a>

PS: If you have any photography or editing suggestions, please don’t hesitate to let Ashley or me know! We would love to feature your tutorial.