FIX-IT-FRIDAY - #107- "Cutie"

Iheartfaces started hosting Fix-it-Friday over on it's Community ning some months ago now, and since then I've just posted to the ning, but this week I've decided to post to both as I really like a couple of my edits!

Original

Drew took this lovely picture of her daughter last summer, but didn't like the blue colour cast reflecting on her face. 
That's not too difficult to fix...
Personally I would have liked to have the top of her head back (but can't really fix that...) and her a little less central. 
The whole thing needed a little pop & pizazz too!


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Basic

• I opened the image in CameraRaw and did a few basic fixes (much as I would in Lightroom, but without quite so many options as I was working with a JPG)
• opened image up in PSE(7) and set to work on the colour cast by sampling the skin around and painting it out with medium opacity, low density 'colour replacement' brush. 
• I then 'healed' a few patches around her mouth 
• Lastly for the skin on her face, I took another sample and with a lower capacity 'stipple' brush I worked over her face to smooth out the skin tones. (I might have done this a few times over).
• Once I was happy with her skin tones, I used a highpass sharp filter, then unsharp 
• Next I used 'Coffeeshop Eyebright' ~ lightly!
• Then I fiddled about with duplicate layers at varying opacities ~ a screen, a soft-light and a burn I THINK!!
• Lastly a second highpass filter
• Cropped to 8X10 and put her on the right more.
• duplicated to carry on working with actions and then saved for the web.
• Imported into LR3 and uploaded to the web from there (it adds another 'sharpen for the web' effect that I really like + my watermarking).

ALL WORK is done on layers, merging and flattening as necessary, although I never loose the original base-layer until I'm happy!

All the actions I used were tweaked to my liking!!

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Lemon & Honey

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Johnna's Memories of Sunshine

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Johnna's Tea-Party

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As above stretched to 6x4

As I said I didn't like the centrality of the child, so I stretched the canvas a little behind her;

• using the 'crop' tool create empty space to the left of her
• using the 'shape' tool choose a rectangle and select an area to spread into the empty space.
• Ctrl T (free transform) and pull the rectangle into the empty space, which should now fill up.
• Deselect (ctrl D) and crop again to taste!

Now it makes you wonder what she's looking at..?

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Berries & Cream BW

 For my BW all I do is convert the basic edit to BW and work from there.

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Berries & Cream BW + Johnna's Tea-Party

I think THIS is my favourite edit of all (I would like it even better on a stretched 6x4) ~ the wistfulness of it seems to fit with the slight tear in her eye :-(

To join in head on over to the iheartfaces community ning and download the original ~ have a go fixing it up and then post it up for everyone to admire :-)