Cropping, levels and skill development

<-Original image
This here is my original photograph of a beach landscape that I used to demonstrate what I have done so far using photoshop elements.

Crop->
Next in elements i used the crop tool to select a part of my photograph to keep whilst the rest is removed.
Doing so means i can adjust the framing of the image, and adjust the height of sand and sky so that it adheres to the rule of thirds. Cropping can completely change the composition of a photograph.

<-Levels
Levels are displayed and altered with histogram. A histogram shows the tonal range of an image, black tones (0) to the left and white tones (255) to the right. There is also a gamma slider which controls how light or dark the mid tones of an image are. An over-exposed image has too many white pixels whilst not a sufficient amount of black pixels. This could be confused with a high-key image which has a lot of white pixels but still has some black as well.
A correctly exposed image has a histogram where the black and white tones run from one end to another, making a full range of different tones in the photo.
An under-exposed image has mostly black tones with no highlights (white tones), there is nothing on the right side of the histogram. A low-key image has most of its pixel in the left in a histogram however still has some highlights to make a full tonal range.
Using levels can help to alter to the tonal range of an image to the photographers liking, different areas can be changed separately using the lasso tool and then opening the levels palette.

Final Image ->

Next I used the Hue/Saturation palette to make the images color more saturated, this made the colors much bolder and brighter. I also opened the Brightness/Contrast palette and used the contrast slider to add more contrast to the image.
Finally I duplicated the image layer, and on the top layer changed the blending mode to soft light and lowered the opacity to about 10%.