Photo Shop Elements 5.0

I asked a photographer several months ago what software I should get for editing my pictures and Photoshop Elements 5.0 is what she recommended. So I got it before Emily was born, installed it and messed around with it for a while and was TOTALLY overwhelmed, so I stopped using it and just worked with my trusty www.kodakgalleries.com. I was reading on the Pioneer Woman's blog the other day and she recommended Photoshop training books by Scott Kelby, so I used that Amazon gift card and ordered a book by Kelby called "Photoshop Elements For Digital Photographers" and it is awesome! Here is just a few of the things I did today...I have been trying to figure out how to get the before and afters side by side so you can see the differences more clearly, but to no avail. I will keep trying.

This first one Emily and Kelli are pretty dark and with lots of shadows...But no more, now they are in the light and the shadows have been minimized. Cool huh??
This is a drink that Dr Oz showed how to make on Oprah last week. It has 1 cup spinach, 4 stalks celery, a cucumber, an apple, and the juice of one lemon...I will post more about this later. But I wanted to do a color selection picture and this was the best one I could come up with. Not so noticible because the color selected item is the majority of the picture. But notice the background is black and white in the second pic and the juice is still in color.

This is going to be the hardest to see the difference, without them side by side. The first one is the SOOC (straight out of camera) picture. Don't you love all this cool lingo I am learning!

This one is just simply changing it to grayscale

This one is removing the color and then adjusting the red, green and blue in the picture...This will take some additional knowledge and practice. I don't have any idea what I am doing...I was just moving sliders around and having a blast!!

Sorry, this is probably totally boring for many of you! But I am stoked to be able to do some of these things and cant wait to learn more!!