Photo 1 - Before: This picture is of my cousin Chelsea with her birthday cake. For whatever reason in this photo she was not smiling, and I thought that she had a great expression of sadness on her face.
After: Originally, I wanted to keep Chelsea and my Grandma in the photo together but they were expressing different emotions so instead, since I wanted to portray a feeling of sadness, I decided to remove my family and the background completely, and put in a group of children behind Chelsea. In the background photo (children bullying background) there were four children. I had to take one out so I could put Chelsea in. The child I took out was a girl who had pigtails in her hair so that is why the boy's back looks slightly misshapen. I wanted to convert this whole photo into black and white, or just Chelsea, but I chose to convert only the bullies into black and white because the various colours of their clothing were very distracting, and with Chelsea being coloured, there is a greater focus on her.
Photo 2: This picture is of Katie, and was taken in a hallway upstairs against some lockers. To make this photo look interesting, I cropped it using the rule of thirds, with Katie off to the right side. I really like the expression of happiness on her face (it was a real laugh not posed). To improve this photo's emotion, I made a gradient background. I used the blue and yellow colours from Katie's shirt, mostly because they looked nice together, and the yellow in the background seems to act like a bright light/sun that brings a happy glow to the picture. Also I used the "poster edges" effect on Katie so that the gradient background wouldn't look as fake with her in front of it. 
This is a photo of Kara looking out the window in one of the hallways upstairs. In the original photo, there were many lockers behind Kara's back, so I cropped them out, also using rule of thirds, so they wouldn't be so distracting. Also in the original photo, there were vents on the roof outside of the window, so I took them out using a clone stamp of the snow that was around them. After I finished that, I converted the picture to black and white to give it a more dramatic feeling.
