{the same but different}

the kids had a day off from school yesterday. we spent a lazy morning at home doing laundry, planning the menu and doing the shopping on line ! our groceries arrived this morning and i've put them away already ! it's 7:38 am (love it) i couldn't do all the shopping on line though because i needed stuff for dinner last night. but that's a whole nother story.

getting back to this story ...

about lunch time, we finished hanging the last load of laundry and got ourselves packed up for an afternoon at the beach.

welcome to winter in queensland !!!

the kids actually wanted to swim but the best i'd go them is walking in the water, and dodging the spray of the waves on the rocks. i took my camera, of course, and many many photos were taken. last night, after the kids were in bed, and while rory watched the footy, i sat and played in GIMP.

i did this photo with many different effects and can't decide which one i like best. what do you think ??

this is the straight out of camera photo ...

if you are here visiting from melody's SOOC Saturday, you may want to stop reading here as the photo above is my submission for this week ... the photos below are anything BUT sooc !!! :)

here's my basic formatting ... what i usually do to most of my photos. i played with the curves, brightness and saturation just slightly and added a vignette to the edges and a black border around the outside.

here, i used 'apply threshold' and it changed to this lovely black and white. i used a white paintbrush to get rid of everything but the kids and their shadows ... added a black border too.

for this next one, i used the colorize feature and then messed with the hue, saturation and lightness to get this blue overall tone. i also rounded the corners.

after i'd done a few of these, i decided to do a few more. i really was just liking all of the effects that were happening and thought i'd just try some stuff that i'd never tried before. the next one was an accident. i was playing with the brightness and saturation to make it vibrant enough to change to a nice sepia or black and white but i liked what it did so left it.

what i did was make it quite bright and then pulled the saturation up as well. this made the background pretty much disappear. i used the clone tool to get rid of the little rocks in the sand as i wanted just the kids and their reflection left. i did a vignette and rounded the edges. i love vignettes !! do ya'll know how to do them ? i can do a little tutorial if any of you are interested. it's easy peasy ! just let me know in the comments ..

this last one might be my favorite. i don't know. i just can't choose. but i love what happened to the color of the sand and water !! i was messing with the 'auto' features on this one, where the program just does automatic adjustments. i used the auto equalize, auto white balance, auto color enhance and auto normalize. a little tweek with the brightness and contrast and here's what resulted ...

oh yeah, i rounded the corners on that one too !

so, tell me ... do you have a favorite ? and what is it about that particular one that makes it your favorite ??