Some before and after practice

I've been working on trying to get some practice on my photoshop skills.
I do not use Photoshop (or in my case Photoshop Elements) very often at all. I use Lightroom for the VAST majority of my editing. Version 4 of Lightroom is really amazing for editing actually.

These photos however, needed more then what Lightroom can do.

NOTE: You should be able to click any of these and make them larger.

So in this first one I liked the eagle, but the smoke stack and the blurry crow didn't work for me.

Before

After

This one, I quite like the body position and the sense of action with the Eagle carry a clump of garbage. Unfortunately, I chopped the wing off.  So I extended the canvas above the bird. Then I copied the bottom wing tip. Flipped it, enlarged it so it fit, then rotated it in place.  I cloned out part of the garbage heap that I found distracting.  Then I burned (darkened) the heap.  

The hard part of this one was the sky. I found smoothing out the sky was tough. I am sure there is an easier way to do it, but I will have to learn it.

I also decided to try the square crop.

Before

After

So, what's the take away for you? Try playing with stuff on your computer! This is what I did.

Thanks for reading!
Cheers.