Show Your Skills 11.21.10 {and a giveaway}

Time to show off your editing skills (or put in some practice). This week’s Show Your Skills picture is a picture I snagged of my daughter on a tree swing not long before sunset (see the backlighting). As with most of pictures taken with my Nikon D90, this image is way too cool. That is why, instead of fighting to get the skin tone correct, I encourage you to try your hand at converting this image into a black and white.

To make Show Your Skills party even more fun, each week I giveaway something Photoshop Elements or photography related. Last week it was one of Morgan Kervin’s posing guides. The winner of the guide is entry #24, Brooke, from Deracinated. Congrats, Brooke! Please contact me with which guide you would like.

Here are your random numbers:
24
Timestamp: 2010-11-21 08:01:13 UTC

This week’s Show Your Skill giveaway item is a $25 gift card to Pretty Presets. Laura, the very talented and very sweet owner of Pretty Presets, creates beautiful presets for Lightroom and Adobe Camera RAW (not applicable for ACR in PSE). Plus she has come out with gorgeous textures, cards and digital papers! Here is the catch for the giveaway – you must link up an edit of the image below in order to be entered in the giveaway.

Okay, onto this week’s picture to edit. Below is the SOOC shot and you get to edit it however you please, BUT, I’d love to see lots and lots of B&W’s!

To download, click on image above and choose ‘actions’ or click HERE to download the largest size.

I wrote a separate post today about black and white conversions and places for free actions, so to see my steps, click HERE. I did not use an action to make my B&W conversion, only three simple layers. However, after flattening, I did use two textures from Pretty Preset’s Vintage Texture set. After that I used Coffeeshop’s Web Frame It action to get the nice little frame around my image and have it resized for the web, on in one fell swoop.

• You are encouraged to edit however you like: your own steps, with an action, with another designer’s actions. Whatever you do is fine.
• You need to leave the copyright on the image, please don’t clone it out. I made it faint, but added it to protect myself from someone taking the image and using it for personal/business use.
• Please link back to this post. You do not have to use the button I provide below, but do link.
• Share what editing program you used (PS, PSE, Picnik, Gimp).
• You can share your image at Flickr or on a blog, then come back and add the link to that post/image in the McLinky. HERE is a video tutorial showing how to link-up.
  
• You can join in at any time during the week; you’re not limited to just today.
• I will visit everyone who links up and give a gentle critic of the edit.

<div align="center"><a href="http://everydayelementsonline.com/" title="Show your Skills at Everyday Elements" ><img src="http://everydayelementsonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Show-Your-Skills-1501.png" alt="Show your Skills at Everyday Elements" style="border:none;" width="150" height="113" /></a></div>

While you may have multiple plays of the picture, please only link up one. When there are multiple entries from one person (although I LOVE seeing the pics), it throws off the giveaway, giving an unfair advantage. I do go in and delete the extra entries. This is NOTHING personal, just trying to keep the giveaway fair.

In case you missed it and need it, HERE is a video tutorial explaining how to link up your edit.