The light was beautiful on my street last night. Peach-edged, backlit clouds, and a little moisture in the air made it a perfect time for shooting. While I love my suburban street, there are power lines and telephone poles in all directions, making pictures less than perfect. But that’s where photo editing comes in.

Using Picasa (free photo editing software from Google) and Photoshop Elements, I turned this not-very-pretty picture (left) into something special (above).

I love the tree at the end of the street, but this shot is boring and flat. I opened up the picture using Picasa, and made the following adjustments:

1) In “basic fixes,” I cropped the shot to focus on the tree.

2) In “Tuning,” I increased the shadow level to make the darks a little darker, then I increased the highlight level just a tish to get the balance right and make it a little more contrasty.

3) In “Effects,” I added an overall color tint of a reddish purple and a graduated tint to make the top of the sky a little darker.

My final adjustment of removing the power lines had to be done in Photoshop using the Clone Stamp. I recently got Photoshop Elements for free with a mouse tablet I bought and it works great. All told, these adjustments took about 10 minutes and the shot is much improved, don’t you think?