Fix-It Friday #44 - Sweet Girl!

Original.

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Fix one

Doing my best to remember now...

• duplicated the background layer
• Used 'golden sections' to crop
• On copy layer I then adjusted in levels and curves, bringing up the darks a lot to lighten it a good deal (an over-arch curve)
• duplicated this layer and made it a screen layer with decreased the opacity.
• Added a colour layer of mid-beige, made it grain merge
• Copied beige layer and made the copy layer soft light.
• Selected around Emma and copied her then pasted her into a new transparency layer.
• High-pass sharpened this Emma layer, erased the sharpening from her face
• Copied the Emma layer
• Made a layer mask on this layer and painted around her eyes with a flesh tone (using droplet tool), then decreased the opacity to blend
• Merged her down.
• Framed using 'add a frame' script.

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Fix two

I worked straight of fix one, but added a duplicate layer, which I desaturated and lower the opacity of to bring out just a touch of colour.

I used a script for the edge effect.

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Fix Three

Working of fix two, I added to colour layer; a blue one set to soft light mode and a pinkish one set to screen. Both layers had decreased opacity to just give a slight cross process effect.

'Add a frame' script for border.

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Just quickly today, but I shall try to post up the steps later. I have a birthday party this afternoon for my girls :D.

This was all done in Gimp (no Lightroom, no PSE & NO ACTIONS!) I wanted to try to do it myself and stretch myself a little. I'm really pleased with these, but I just wish they didn't look so pixelated :(

Check back later for the step-by-step (well as much of it as I can remember anyway!).

And in the meantime check out everyone else's fixes over at FIX-IT-FRIDAY.

POST-SCRIPT ~ I've now put the photos on Flickr and linked them in that way. Hopefully they look less pixelated :D

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This one is an extra little fiddle around with Fix one (in PSE7) adding two actions with tweeks ~ 'CoffeeShop Perfect Portrait' & 'Johnna's memories of Sunshine'

I really wanted to have a go with the new CoffeeShop Sunkiss action, but I can't get PSE to see it :( I thought this photo would lend itself well to it.

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OK ~ so this evening I discovered the link to the RAW file (thanks Kelly), so I thought I'd have a quick see what I could do in Camera Raw. This is straight off from there ~ I can see the potential for this now, but I'm too tired to play anymore, and I think that's enough fixes for one day!!;

Increased the exposure, the brightness, the contrast and the recovery.

Sharpened.

Set to 'cloudy'

Set to 'camera faithful'

Cropped to a 5x7

"C'est tout!"