This week's theme is "app effects." Could you have guessed the theme without the title giving it away? If so, then I guess you have a keen eye for spotting Instagram-like features :)

         Until Wednesday,  I had no idea of what to do for this week's theme. Then it dawned on me, why not take a sari to the beach? I asked my sister to be my muse and we got to shooting. Unfortunately, there wasn't a lot of wind... so we had to improvise. We tried several poses both in and out of the water. Then a big wave cut short our shoot because the sari became completely drenched in sand. Here's one of the shots that was taken right before that dreadful wave.

        I had asked my sister to take three steps towards the water, and as she was walking, I took this shot. During processing, I added some warmth to give it the yellow-red effect. Thereafter, I slightly blurred the edges of the shot to add more focus on the subject. Finally, I played around with the RGB color curve until I got the final hues that you see in the image above. I don't think I could replicate the overall coloring I got, since I just shifted the curves until I got something most pleasing to my eye. Guess I need to work on honing in my Lightroom skills. 

        Here's a preview of the various editing stages this photo underwent. The upper left is the original shot, the upper right has added warmth and structuring, the lower right was where I began playing around with the RGB curve and the lower right is the final version. 

        Additional shots of the shoot can be found here.

       Special thank you to my sister for enduring a gigantic wave and a sari full of sand :)

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