playing with pictures

I have a confession.  I've been playing with my pictures again.  For Christmas I used Blurb to make a book for Jeff of the pictures I took over the summer.  I can tell you now because he got the book today.  I used Picasa to edit the pictures for that book.  But remember how I don't really like Picasa?  Anyway, I decided that I wanted a book of my own with all of my pictures and I was going through and editing more of them with Picasa.  AND THEN.  And then I saw a post by Blurb on Facebook saying that Lightroom 4 would have Blurb's bookmaking tool built-in.  So I clicked on the link and to my delight I found out that there's a beta version of Lightroom 4 that I could download for free.  I've spent the last few days figuring out LR4 and editing my pictures.  Whoa.  LR4 is great.  I don't know what the differences are between this LR and the earlier versions other than the bookmaking tool which I actually haven't used yet.  I do know that LR is much, much, much better than Picasa.  There are more options for editing and adjusting the settings on the pictures.  I can hardly believe the difference.  I don't know how well these will show up on the blog.  I've also uploaded them to photobucket so that I can put them side by side.  On my computer the difference is pretty amazing.

Here's one from one of the parks in London.  It went from blobs in the water to seeing clear reflections of the trees/bushes. Before is on the left in all of these.




This is in Edinburgh.  The color of the sky came back!  That's my favorite thing about all of these, I think.  The way the texture of the clouds and the colors show up.




This last one is in Greece.  We had walked up to the top of the city and the view was gorgeous but I couldn't figure out the camera settings.  Either Jeff was really dark or the view was too bright to see anything.  Lightroom let me light up Jeff so that you can see him better but still see the blue of the sky and view out on the water.