i heart faces: Fix-It Friday #56

It's fix-it Friday time again at iheartfaces!! And the picture this week is adorable as usual!
This week's photo was submitted by JaimeLee at Candidly Grateful.  Here is what she wrote about her photo: "This is a photo of my twins at 6 weeks old. I love the photo because of their interaction and their faces, but I feel like it’s a little drab or flat. It needs some life."

Here is the original picture:

And here is my "fix":

As you can see, I had lots of fun playing with the pattern on the wall for my fix. I've had CS5 for a couple of weeks now and was looking for an opportunity to test out it's new Content Aware feature!!

To start off with, I opened the picture in ACR in CS5 and adjusted the exposure a bit. In CS5 I duplicated the layer and then used the quick selection tool and selected the pillow with babies and then went to edit->fill and selected "content aware" and it filled the babies and pillow in with the pattern (those babies looked like they had had an all body tatoo!) I decided 6 weeks was just too young for so much tatooing so I masked out the pattern on the babies. I set that layer on linear burn and did a green overlay on it.

Then I ran a few actions over it. All the actions I used are from Amy McMaster Photography: http://amymcmasterphotography.com/ I started with her "clean it up" action which I especially liked this time for the "yellow lifter" layer. The little guy was a bit more yellow than his sister, so I used the yellow lifter to take some of the yellow out of his face. (since the baby on the right doesn't have a headband on, I will call him a "he" and hope that I am right.... ) Then I ran "lost in translation" (tweaked), flattened the image and ran "mist" (tweaked) on top of that at 40% opacity. Flattened the picture and ran Amy's "soft vignette" action over it. And finally a framing action.

Since I still wanted to goof around with content aware, I selected, copied and pasted the pattern onto a new layer. Then selected the frame, but went onto the layer with just the pattern and again filled with content aware. Afterwards I reversed my selection and cut out the pattern from the middle of the picture and put the frame layer on linear dodge. And just to play around some more, I put a bevel&emboss on the layer and darkened the very outside edges slightly.

It may be too "patterny" but I kind of like the look and I sure had fun playing around with content aware while looking at these two sweeties!!

Be sure to check out more fixes at iheartfaces:http://iheartfaces.blogspot.com/