So this is the picture right out of the camera: nothing to special. Spacing is off, lighting is bad, White balance is out of whack....basically it needs some work and thank goodness photoshop allows us to fix everything that needs to be fixed. (the goal is to obviously have the camera settings adjusted to get the picture that is taken look as best possible without needing to do much editing) 
Because I know that I am going to make this a black and white photo I change the background to blue...sometimes having a colored background makes the black and white version look better. Using a "paint" tool I fill as much of the background as I can with a blue paint.
Because I know that I am going to make this a black and white photo I change the background to blue...sometimes having a colored background makes the black and white version look better. Using a "paint" tool I fill as much of the background as I can with a blue paint.
Obviously there was alot of excess "paint" that needed to be removed. So using my eraser tool I clean up all the edges and make sure that there isn't any "bare" spots. I also used some lighting tools to brighten up his eyes to make him stand out a little bit more.
Once I got everything filled in I click on one of my Black and White actions and decide if I like it or not. Pretty simple process really. Now, obviously there were a lot of small details that I left out. This picture took me about 10-15 minutes to edit...so you can see how doing an entire CD of 35 images could take a lot time. 
BEFORE
AFTER
and seniors... 
