I ♥ Faces - Fix it Friday - #41- We Are Family

To go along with the "We Are Family" theme, i heart faces wanted to highlight a family that is very special to them - the Zwart family. Angie (co-founder of i heart faces) is friends with Jeff and Adrienne...and Adrienne is also an active participant in our weekly challenges.

The dad in this family has been struggling with cancer for years and they found out the devastating news in December that his cancer is now terminal. They are now doing everything they can to enjoy the rest of the time they have together on this earth.

To bless this family please stop by Adrienne's Blog or Jeff's Caring Bridge site to leave a kind word of encouragement today. One thing is for sure; i heart faces has got to be the kindest, most caring, compassionate participants in the blogging world and they would be thrilled we all took time & overwhelmed this beautiful family with kind thoughts today.

As part of blessing this family today we have been asked to 'fix-up' a family photo of them all. It's a lovely photograph, with mum and dad subtly faded into the background, but none the less there. I guess that's how it gets to be as our children grow up ~ we fade into the background of their lives and yet remain there, watching them and being there for them when they need us. It struck me, that these children may face teenage and adulthood without the physical presence of their earthly father, but he will always remain in their memories forever ~ as a figure in the background of their lives, who adored them and was always there for them. All this somehow made this capture even more poignant. I wanted to give it a timeless feel, so that when they look at it in years to come it's aged appearance will not seem out of place because ~ "that's the way it's always been!"

As always I used a hippity-hoppity combination of LR, PSE7 and Gimp.

Original.

With basic LR adjustments - auto tone (tweaked a little), punch, sharpen, crop & rotate.

Taken into PSE7 and applied coffee-shop's Perfect Portrait action – WOW …

This looked amazing, but I wanted it to look old, so I took it into Gimp, where I have a script called ‘Old Photo’ that I love. I applied that and then I did something to make it darker and more contrasted, but I can’t remember what!! It was only subtle though! After that I applied a texture of my own (an photo of an old piece of timber) – converted it to B&W so as not to alter the colour of the photo again – lowered the opacity right down, set it to ‘soft light’ mode, applied a mask and erased over the bits I didn’t want the effect on. I like it a lot, but I must tell you – this was my 2nd edit :D

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So – here’s the first batch I did ~ I know you’ll want to see them, but I just wish I’d applied that ‘perfect portrait’ to them before I did anything else ~ it made such a difference to their faces! They all carry straight on from the basic LR fix instead.

Coffee-shop Attic Vintage + Coffee-Shop Vintage Honey (fiddled with the layers) + a texture of my own in multiply mode and erased from certain areas.

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Really can’t remember, but I think it might have been the ‘Creamy Toffee Latte’ action turned right down.

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Coffee-Shop Splendor B&W with some layer tweaks.

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Can’t remember at all, but I know it was a coffee-shop job!

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Last one – perfect portrait + creamy chocolate with some tweaks + curves adjustment to pull down the blown out areas ( I've got an action to adjust curves in PSE called ‘Grants Tools’ and it works in the guided action player).

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And one for luck..!

I took the perfect portrait into picnik and added a faded dageurrotype curve (so easy) - and framed it :D

I think I could have applied just about any action to this photo and it would have looked great, because it was lovely to begin with! So I stopped!! What I love about these 'almost' last two, is the fact that everything is desaturated except Mum and Dad. I didn’t use selective colouring, I just upped the saturation by 10 % and it picked them out – easy :D ~ I'm not sure which is my favourite overall, but I do like the desat’ ones. It depends what you want from the picture I guess…and I think for that reason I like my ‘old photo’ – it achieved my aim :D


Just to add - these look really pixelated on Blogger (and the layout has gone weird too!), but if you click on them you will get to see them as I see them - nice and clean!


Now please make sure to go and see everyone else's beautiful fixes of this photograph and bless this family today ~ i heart faces