Blur, Gots Some Blur

Here I am attempting to element blur in my pictures. Here is my first picture and my first attempt. It was not too blurry, but I really like this picture and I wanted to make sure it looks good. I followed this tutorial to fix the blur.

Original 

Edited: I feel like this one has more details. However it was not much of an edit, so I tried again with this picture.

Original 

Edited one: I followed the same steps to sharpen the picture as I did above. 

I still felt like I needed to challenge myself so I chose this picture of a statue. This picture is very blurry so I did my best to edit it.

Original: 

First I reduced the blur and sharpened it:

Although this image was sharper, it had a lot of noise. I did my best to use what we learned last year to reduce the noise. 

Sharpening things is a lot of work. It has taught me the importance to making good exposures, so you have less work to do. I just got back from my spring break trip, only to realize that I took my 1300 pictures in low quality JEPG's. Now fixing images is even harder. I'm glad I'm leering the tools though to fix pictures. 

Noise, so much noise

So I just returned home from my spring break trip to London and Italy and let me tell you I took a lot of pictures. Being a backpacker I could not afford (both money and space) to buy too many souvenirs. I bought the essentials (a juice box of wine, and a scarf) but most of the memories of my trip came in the form of pictures. In the 10 days I was there I took over 13000 pictures. Here is one of my pictures from Florence of the Ponte Vecchio or Old Bridge. 

Original  

Noisy spot

For my first attempt to edit this picture I followed a tutorial called Two Minuet Fix of Noise Blur. However I was unhappy with the end result. 

I though that this almost had more noise than the original. 

For my next try I followed tutorial that used a Gaussian Blur. I followed this step by step. I was happy with this but I though that the water still had too much noise. 

I used the magnetic lasso to chose the water and then copy and paste it.  I then used filters like Smart Blur and Dust and Scratches to reduce noise more. 

From there I used the blur tool to blend the extra edited part of the water into the background layer. 

Here is the original noisy part. I think that it has much less noise now. 

Here is the final picture. 

Photoshop CS6

I am very excited to try the new Adobe Photoshop CS6 program. One feature that I think will be extra helpful is that you can search through layers. I know that I always have a lot of open layers, and it would save me so much time if I could easily find a layer that I need. I also like how in incorporates things that we have become popular through cell phone apps. I was trying to edit pictures like Instagram the other day and it took a long time. Although they are simple its fun to have a quick way to change your pictures.