Well I am gradually getting the hang of my camera and of course what to do with the photos once you have taken them. I am really enjoying learning the art of photo retouching. I could see my self really getting into it and becoming a specialist retoucher. In particular I would like to take potraits of people and create those really gritty hard light effects like you see on movie posters. I have been learning the retouching part of that so far, but I still need to learn the manipulation part where you seamlessly change the background and add other elements, then colour grade it to bring all the parts together into a new image.

I have only done one fully retouched image so far of my niece from a photo shoot I did with my sister and her kids back in 2013.

This first one is the original image. A couple of days before she had got a scratch under one eye.

In this image I removed the scratch and the chocolate on her lip.

In this image I enhanced her eyes

Which gave me the idea to desaturate the whole image leaving just her eyes and her lips as in colour to make it look like a hand painted black and white image

Below are another series of images with before and after examples.
Before

After

Before

After

Before

After

Before

After

Before

After

These ones above were all done on RAW images I took myself. This one was done on a jpg image taken by someone else. Even though it was just a jpg image I was still able bring up the colours better than they were in the original, so the final image is not too bad.

Before

After