Stock Photo Editing Challenge #01

Whats up Steemians today i'm excited to officially start my Stock Photo Editing Challenge. Here are the rules.

1. I will be taking free stock photos and re-editing them and doing a comparison and you all vote on which on you like the best.

2. All photos will be from sites that are royalty free and allow the photos to be used in any way people wish, as well as a link to the original website the photo came from.

3. No photos that require special permissions or licensing will be used.

4. I will post the original photo and then a breakdown of the changes I made and the settings I used followed at the end by my final result.

So without further ado lets get started.

Heres todays photo from pexels.com

At first glance I really liked this photo but I felt the colors were a little too muted and the orange was a little overwhelming. It felt like there was some missed potential hiding in this photo.

I brought up the exposure just a tad and wanted to try and bring down the highlights to try and bring back more of the darker detail. I brought up the shadows a lot to try and recover some of the smaller details in her hair and then adjusted the Vibrance and Saturation a little bit.

Then with the Tone Curve I wanted to wash out the blacks just a bit so there was a bit less contrast in the darker areas.

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The HSL is one of my favorite sections to play around with and balance or ever change the hues and saturation of individual colors to see what interesting results and looks can be achieved.

Finally I added a little bit of sharpening and smoothed out the grain that was already in the photo.

After all of these adjustments here in my edit of the photo.

The changes may be subtle in some spots but overall I feel that my edit brings more life to the moment than the original and brings a new life to it. What do you think? Which one do you prefer? The Original or My Edit?

You may be wondering why I am doing this? The answer is very simple. I love photography and editing and I want to improve and try new techniques. While I do have my own camera I don't have access to many of the other locations or lighting conditions or the same editing taste or style as another photographer. I believed that doing something like this is a good challenge. To take a photo that's not your own and see what you can do with it to make it your own and bring new life to it.