I confess...

Magnolia Tree Before and After

May I just first say, I'm a hobby picture taker.  Just out snapping for my own pleasure.  But, I love Photoshop.  I spend a lot of time tweaking my photos before posting them on Flickr.  I don't think it's anything new.  Photographers have been altering photos to suit their vision for quite some time.  Ansel Adams said: "Dodging and burning are steps to take care of mistakes God made in establishing tonal relationships."  I think he would have really loved Photoshop.
When we're out shooting, the beauty carries us away.  The light! The color! The textures!  We merrily snap the shutter and miss the telephone wires, the fire hydrants. the parking meters, the hot mess of old dead ivy.
So I clone stuff out.  I jack up the colors.  I play with shadows and mid-tones and stuff until I have the photo I saw when I snapped the shutter.  Don't judge me.  I can't help myself.  Of course, I have my limits.  I still prefer the photo looks like something a person would recognize as something their eyes might actually see.  I've seen some amazing things done with High Dynamic Range.  Per Wikipedia: "...HDR is a range of techniques geared toward representing more contrast in pictures. Non-HDR cameras take pictures at a single exposure level with a limited contrast range. This results in the loss of detail in bright or dark areas of a picture, depending on whether the camera had a low or high exposure setting. HDR compensates for this loss of detail by taking multiple pictures at different exposure levels and intelligently stitching them together so that we eventually arrive at a picture that is representative in both dark and bright areas."  In the wrong hands this can go wrong in way too many ways:

High Dynamic Range Mashup

Fortunately, there's lots of fun stuff one can do in Photoshop:

Spring branches tarted up with texture, etc.

I love to work in textures and layers.

Rapture of the Deep

I made an entire sketchbook of these for the Sketchbool Project.
It was very much fun.
Sometimes I just make collages for myself:

"When you fish for love, bait with your heart, not your brain" ~ Mark Twain

 Sometimes it's for a purpose:

"Through the Fire"

This image was for a benefit for breast cancer.  Portraits thought to show women with breast cancer, Diagnostic images of cancer. Molecules of Fluorouracil, Cyclophosphamide and Methotrexate used in chemotherapy for breast cancer.

Here's one for a show called "Dark":

Falling

Spring Greetings!

Peeps in Paradise

Happy Spring, everyone!