As I mentioned in the last Coffee Buzz, I went to New York last weekend and took a bunch of photos of the tourist destinations we went to, so for this week's Whim of the Week I thought I could focus on my photo editing!
I've probably mentioned before, I'm just an amateur photographer so my skills are super limited. I got into the craft back in high school because I wanted to take my own photos to document my artwork, instead of always needing my art teacher to do it for me. That was also when I got into photo editing, because I had to learn how to color-correct the photos so that they could represent my work better.

Senior year of high school I did an AP Painting and Drawing Portfolio centered around stage makeup, where I designed 12 makeup looks on my best friend, photographed them, edited the photos, and then painted them.

Samples from my portfolio: Photographs above, art counterparts below

It was at this point when I really began playing with photography and editing. I had an Olympus DSLR that my mom had bought and never used (she bought it before she got pregnant with my sister, and after she had my sister she realized how inconvenient it was to try and carry an infant and a massive camera at the same time, so she reverted back to her point-and-shoot), and I began to play with the different settings.

So back to New York - I tend to keep my camera on the Auto setting because it's the easiest to deal with when I'm trying to take photos quickly for tourism purposes. While I usually edit to make the photograph look more like the original scene, I used this opportunity to play with vibrance, saturation, and temperature of the photos.

Brooklyn Bridge - I wanted to play with a black and white composition to really let the photo composition pop, but I kept a sepia tone (by toggling temperature) to give it an old-timey feel.

I wanted the yellow of The Standard to pop even more, so I played with vibrance and saturation to mute the other colors. As you can see, the green from the bushes on the High Line is still saturated!

I tried to make the abstract sculpture stand out even more by muting the background and cropping the photo (not shown here) so that the sculpture was the center of the composition.

What's a photo of NYC without the bright yellow taxis? Similar to how I edited the picture of The Standard, I played with vibrance and saturation to make the yellow of the taxis pop against the muted, mostly black-and- white skyline of the city.

As you might be able to tell, I like playing around with saturation and playing up the color contrast, since I'm personally particularly receptive to color. However, at the same time I dislike photos that are black and white with one particular component masked to remain colorful as I find them highly cliché and over-edited (though I do not deny that they can be done very well). When I edited these particular photos, I tried my best to avoid accidentally causing that situation, and I prefer how color seeps into the muted tones of my photos.

What do you think? What are your opinions on photo editing? Do you play around with photography and photo manipulation in your free time?