My first new light box photos!  I’m so stoked with my new purchase – these photos are infinitely better than the majority of my photos and I took these late at night the day I got the light box before I went to bed because I was so desperate to try it out!

I started with two coats of China Glaze Exotic Encounters from the new On Safari collection.  Considering my love for all polishes that are teal, I surprisingly hate this polish.  Despite looking at lots of swatches, it’s much more green in real life to me and far too dark for my taste.  So I quickly went into enhancement mode and decided that maybe a subtle stamp would improve the situation.  So I whipped out A England St George and stamped over it with a bubbly design from one of my jumbo plates.  I still didn’t like it, but it was late and I could either change my nails or try my new light box…I went with testing the new light box!

I really am thrilled with the improvement in my photos and I’m hoping they will get even better as I go.  I’ve been reading The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 Book for Digital Photographers by Scott Kelby for the last week and would really recommend it for bloggers who want to improve their post processing using Lightroom.  I’m a big fan of Scott Kelby’s books and have some others stashed away that are more geared towards photography.  I’ve always used Lightroom for my post processing, but where as I used to have a basic understanding of a few tools and could get by, now I have picked up so many tips on my whole post processing process and feel much more efficient.  Even the process of just reviewing my photos and picking out the good ones has gotten so much easier now I know about the different views and tools available.

I like Lightroom over Photoshop because it’s geared towards managing a catalogue of photos and fixing (or enhancing, depending on your end goal) photos.  Now I know a lot of bloggers and readers debate whether swatch photos should be manipulated or not and I want to be open that I do use post processing on my photos to ensure that the colours are accurate.  I’m not sitting here going crazy changing my photos (as the amount of cat hair that shows up in my photos would testify) but I’m not going to show you a photo where a polish doesn’t look anything like it does in real life.  I just wanted to put that out there while I’m on the subject.

So there you go, I still have one or two older posts to publish with non light box photos but you can expect this to be my standard going forward (unless it’s a holo polish where sunlight is mandatory for photos in my opinion).  What do you think?