Playing around with Photoshop Elements

Hello there, I've had a few minutes to myself this evening and thought I'd share something I've been playing around with.  A while back I discovered that Adobe will let you use any of their programs for a trial 30 days so I started out with Lightroom, which I liked, but I felt like I didn't have a lot of control over the images.  I'm sure there was more to it then I saw because I didn't really spend a whole lot of time with it.  Then I tried Photoshop CS5 (which I don't think I will be able to afford) and now I am using Elements (whichi is more in my budget).  I have to say that the easiest for me to learn has been Elements.  I'd say it is because Gimp is a lot like it.  Most everything is in the same spot as in Gimp.  There are definitely some great advantages of using Elements over Gimp and one of them is actions.  I picked up some free actions here and there.  The one I used in this image is from a photographer I follow on fb.  She's very talented and I'm sure you guys have heard of her.  Oh so posh photography  She also seems like such a sweet person.  Her actions are very cool, but since I don't actually own the program, I haven't purchased them, I just grabbed a couple of her free actions.  

So I pulled a picture that I took in June, didn't really think even enough of this shot to convert it from RAW at the time.

(SOOC)  You may notice that this is from the same session as my banner :0)   

I ran the action and tweaked the levels a bit and this is the result:

Obviously the quality of the shot isn't great, it's a little out of focus, but I really like what the action did to it.

Well, thanks so much for stopping in :0) Happy Tuesday and I am so glad it's my Thursday!!!! YAY!