I looooooove me some Photoshop actions!

As much as I like to think I can "design" and am "creative", I always seem to struggle with one of the best design programs out there. Photoshop. It might be all of the different options and me never having taken a class or reading the manual, but I'm just not the biggest fan. I MUCH prefer working in Illustrator and InDesign. HOWEVER, as I mentioned in my last post, PW's Actions are the GREATEST! And even to someone who is not the most well-aquainted with Photoshop, the actions are E-A-S-Y, which is the best part. You can apply an action to a photo just by pressing the 'play' button. And Ree has even made it easy to remove an action if you don't like the effect by pressing the play button on another action that's sole purpose is to undo already applied actions. Genius. I've been spending a lot of my free time lately playing around with all of the different actions on all different kinds of photos. I've even LAYERED actions. Ohhh. Ahhh. I know. Crazy.

I've also been working on cropping my photos, trying to create the most eye-pleasing composition. I don't know if this is the best crop for this photo, but I really liked it and didn't know what else to do with it because of the white column in the way.....

ORIGINAL: Straight-out-of-Camera (SOOC)

ORIGINAL: Crop

CROP with ACTIONS: Sunshine, Fresh & Colorful, & Bring out those eyes! (at least I think those were the three actions I used....)

What do you think????? How would you have cropped the picture? Oh, and that's my niece. Isn't she just the CUTEST?!?!?!