Are you afraid your pictures aren't good enough?

Before

After

Here was a picture we were given with an extreme blue hue. In fact, over 20 pictures for an article we published had this same problem. After removing the blue (and adding a little green), I put a nice golden wood border around it.

This is actually a very normal example of the pictures we take. Everything looked good outside, but somehow the picture looks too dark on the screen. In Photoshop, I duplicate the first image, convert the new picture to grayscale mode, do a gaussian blur (Radius 4.2), then select the initial image, set the selection to black channel, with invert. To finish, I fill the contents using 50% Gray, with color dodge mode and 100% opacity.

I really liked this one, but the picture eventually didn't make the cut because the goat on the right appears to have a swayed back. All kinds of things wrong with the original. First, there is some sort of bad shadow on the left. Second, I really would prefer not to have pictures with people in it. So, I removed the shadow by cropping it, and then removed the person by cloning good sections of the barn in the background. Just as a joke, I left the boot between Polly's legs.

Here is an image of 16 of our goats climbing up the hill (9 babies, 1 yearling, 6 moms). The colors were dull and the picture was not very crisp. We were able to isolate the brighter colors, and fix the sharpness and contrast of the picture. Then added a series of borders (blurred, soft, shadow) to give the image a nice effect. If we chose to crop and enlarge this picture a little more, you would see very fine resolution on it.