Shoot and Edit Challenge: Good Night (After)

The lovely and talented Ashley and Jill have teamed together to share their awesome photo editing tips and tricks; I definitely need all the help I can get in this department though I've been trying my best to fake it thanks to sites like Picnik and Pixlr.  This week’s prompt/theme is what says “Good-night” to you so I used a bath-time photo of Sammy. Here's how I edited the photo in Picnik:

1. Manually adjusted the exposure and contrast to brighten things up.
2. Manually adjusted the saturation and temperature balance as the overall tones in the photo were pretty warm; I played around with the settings until I came up with something that minimized the red color cast and remained true to Sammy's skin tone.  (I usually use the neutral dropper to help even things out, but I got better results by manually playing with the settings.)
3. I then used eye bright (at 50% fade) to make Sammy's eyes really stand out.

I'm pretty happy with how the edited photo turned out; here's a side-by-side comparison:

Interested in learning how to edit your photos so that they go from good to wow?  Click below!