The first challenge is designed to get you working with your photos and doing some enhancements that don’t really change the photo, but present them better! So here’s the challenge. Note the instructions given are specific to PSE 9 and are probably the same or similar for other versions of PSE. Sorry, I can’t help with other software but you should be able to do most of these same things in whatever software you use.
1. Pick a photo, this is the easy part! Now my photo is not the sharpest photo I ever took, but you know, I was shooting out a bus window as were the other 40-50 other bus occupants so it was a challenge to even get a photo!!
2. Make a copy of it so that you are NOT working with the original photo. You always want to preserve your original photo.
My original photo:
3. Crop the photo to zero in on the interesting part of the picture and in doing so, you are eliminating the boring parts of the photo.
4. Now let’s work with the lighting a bit. Do you need to lighten or darken the photo? Go to Enhance, adjust lighting, levels and work with the input levels. Move the black, white and gray triangles to see the differences.
5. Now work with the color. Go to Enhance, Adjust color. Try the Remove color cast if the color seems to be a bit off in your photo. I find that photos often have a bluish tinge to them and I like to warm them up. Also try the Adjust Hue/saturation to pop up your colors a bit more. Experiment! If you don’t like what you see, go to Edit and Undo. That’s a very handy tool! It’s probably the one I use the most!
6. Now let’s play around and convert the photo to black and white. Go to Enhance, convert to black white. In PSE 9 a box opens that shows you before and after and there are some styles below and sliders that you can play with to get a result that pleases you. In other versions you may have to go to Enhance, adjust color, remove color. You can then use some of the steps above to improve your photo. I like to work with contrast in particular with black and white photos.
After making adjustments:
7. And let’s go vintage too and convert to sepia. Go to Enhance, adjust color, hue/saturation and click on colorize in the box that opens. Adjust the slider bars for hue, satuation and lightness to get the color of sepia that you want. This is looking a bit purple so it probably need a bit of adjusment but you get the idea!
8. And as a bonus, lets see what it looks like with an antique oval frame. YOu will either have to print this out and scan or take a screen shot. I really love the antique oval frame!
For the challenge post:
1. Your photo before you have done anything to it.
2. your photo after adjusting lighting, color, etc.
3. your black and white photo after adjustments
4. your sepia photo after adjustments
5. your sepia photo with antique frame – this might be hard to do so don’t fret if you can’t do this. This is not part of the overall challenge, its a bonus step!
I will send someone a RAK who participates in this challenge. The winner will be chosen by random selection so everyone has an equal chance of winning.
The more that participate, the bigger the RAK!! I will let you know what it is as soon as I figure it out myself!
Home 
looks way too pale!
the framing sort of softened the sepia but I like it much better.