I'm Learning!

I LOVE taking photos and then editing them to make them more beautiful.  I have much to learn, but am enjoying what I've been learning lately about masks.  Here's an example of how I took a picture of Whitney from Christmas and changed it from yellow and drab, to soft, bright and lovely.  First I used my program's auto balance feature to balance out the colors.  Then I used a mask to brighten her eyes a little, and a clone brush to fix some imperfections on her face.  I smoothed her skin a little, added a Gaussian Blur to the entire image, and used an undo brush to sharpen only her face and hair.  Lastly I added a vignette around her.  The program I used is Sagelight.  Here's the before and after.