Friday, May 21, 2010

i heart faces: Fix-It Friday #55

Time for another "fix-it Friday" at iheartfaces!

This week's photo was submitted by Shelle from Mommy Can't Sing. She wrote: "This is a photo of my 16 months old baby girl. I am currently doing a 365 challenge where I take at least one photo per day. This was one of the photos. Unfortunately, before Daylight Savings a lot of time I was scrambling to take a photo before the light was gone. Well, in this photo it was beyond gone! But my baby was sitting there so sweetly that I couldn't resist taking her photo. The color is bad and the background is messy, but just love her face!"

Here is the original picture:

and here are my edits:
For this basic edit, I opened the original picture in CS5 ACR and using the dropper, I picked a neutral area of the picture to adjust the white balance. Then I upped the exposure and upped the luminance under noise reduction to get rid of the noise in the picture that came when the exposure was increased. Then I went into photoshop. When I work, I always duplicate the layer before applying any new edit so that I have the old version to fall back on in case I'm not happy with what my "experimenting" has created. And I experimented quite a bit on this picture so I will try to write what I did but I may have forgotten things.

The first thing I did was to do a highpass filter on overlay mode then make that layer a hidden mask and only brought in the edges of her eyes (the eyelashes), the irises and pupils at reduced opacity, and the mouth and nose area at even more reduced opacity. Then I reduced the opacity on the entire mask until I had it sharpened without looking over sharpened and merged the layers together. Then I ran AMPs "clean it up" action over the picture, tweaking and adjusting the layers until I was happy with it and flattened the image.

I lightly cloned in some of the darker shadows under her eyes did a gaussian blur on screen mode at 20% only on her skin and flattened the picture again. I have never done this before, but I noticed she had no catchlights in her eyes and they looked almost fake after they had been lightened with all the post processing done so far so I added catchlights by selecting a small area in each eye and filling it with white then erasing at 30% until I was happy with the way they looked. I also used the smoothing tool to blur them a bit.

Then I ran AMPs "softly" action from her little sugar collection over the picture and tweaked it a bit and saved it, producing the above edit.

For my next edit, I used the basic edit I had and ran Pioneer Woman's "soft and faded" action also tweaking the different layers and duplicating some of the layers.

And for my last edit, I ran AMPs sweetly BW action, again from her A Little Sugar Collection over the picture turning on the brown, cream and pink hazes (changing the modes to overlay and increasing the pink).

Just a little note, be sure to check out Amy McMaster Photography (AMP) http://amymcmasterphotography.com/ because she is in the process of releasing new actions, including "A Little Sugar Collection" which contains some of the actions I used on my edits today. If you hurry, you'll still have a chance at winning one or two of her action sets and as one of her testers, I can tell you, they are worth getting!!

And to see more "fix-it Friday" fixes, be sure to head on over to iheartfaces!!

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7 comments:

  1. I've been toggling between your three edits and I can't decide which one I like best! Really. All are great! :)

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  2. Love these edits! They are all beautiful!

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  3. So so lovely!! I really love the last one! Thanks for participating and working on my photo!

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