RAW Post Processing example and Thanks!

After reading these forums for the last month or so I decide to snap a couple of pictures in RAW on the weekend with a girl my friend was doing a shoot for. I have had my 20D for a couple of weeks and this was the first time I had tried it in manual mode as well. The JPG out of the camera was quite underexposed and the yellow wall and green skirting board behind did nothing for the photo.

Using the workflow I have learnt by reading threads on here and reading about how to mask, then coming back to the forums each time I got stuck I managed to make a great improvement over the original. My masking skills are probably the main area I need to work on right now as can be seen by the edges on the final photo.

A big thanks to the likes of RAitch and Photosguy and the other PS gurus for their posts.

Here is the original JPG, just resized, exactly as it came out of the camera.

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That was a very good attempt on masking. The edging is a little too sharp for my taste. I personally prefer using magnetic lasso then the lasso tool to crop and modify using multiple layers and then using layer/matting/defringe remove the white around the crop. Other then that the RAW definitely better then the JPEG.

Thanks for your feedback. I don't even know what half those things you mentioned are. I have never heard of matting/defringe before. I'm glad you mentioned them though. I'll have a read about what they do. Maybe I can shave a few hours of my masking next time. lol.