improvements...............?

[butterfly.shel]

What can i do to improve my strawberries?
Could you also explain (in simple terms) what you've done

thank you xx

 

[divine`]

Very simply increasing the contrast slightly will improve the shot hugely. I'd use curves to go about this, though if i recall, you have Elements, which may not have the curves tool. In which case, use Brightness/Contrast, up the contrast a touch and maybe decrease the brightness a touch if the whites are too bright.

Auto Levels will also yield a good easy improvement and this often the case for a lot of shots.

Increasing saturation a touch with the Hue/Saturation tool will also help a bit, be gentle though.

Sharpening is another thing that will give the image more punch. Use the 'Unsharp Mask' (USM) filter. A quick try with the setting at Amount 75% - Radius 0.7 - Threshold 4 looked pretty good to me.

Doing those things to that picture, or indeed most pictures will yield simple and fast results that look pretty pleasing and working from that as a base will hopefully work well for you. As you get more confident, you can experiment with the Levels tool itself, rather than use Auto Levels for example.

Hope that helps

edit - doing just those steps I outlined gives me something like this;

 

[Breaker]

I'm sure someone will be along shortly (if they haven't already) to blow my effort away, but here you go...

That's Photoshop's curves being played with, then upping the reds and dropping the blues in color balance, then selecting the leaves and bumping them up seperately (again curves).

 

[divine`]

Those leaves look radioactive!

On a more serious note, you've also blown all the detail out of the red areas.

 

[Chappers]

If you've CS3 opt for Photoshop to handle jpegs as RAW files. That gets you into the ACR control panel with loads of image tweeks and controls.

Here I simply lowered the "Darks" a small amount and did a similar tweek to the " Lights". This made the image a bit dark so a small increase in "Exposure" to lighten things up.

Then drop the luminance slightly in the green channel to darken slightly the green leaves . Add a bit of " Vibrance" and add some "Clarity". Less than 60 seconds.

Took me longer to type this.. No I'm not showing off I'm just demonstrating how easy it is with the ACR panel in CS3 to make image adjustments.

If you've Lightroom you have the same controls as well

 

[Charlie C]

i went for a slightly colder look.

Firstly i added a very slight S curve using the curves adjuster in CS3 (photoshop). I then used the colour balance adjuster using these settings:

I thought i'd be good to sort the green out a little bit, so i boosted the yellow channel only in the hue/saturation adjuster to +14 saturation, and thats all.

Not sure if its what you wanted, but its a different take on things.