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Photography has recently become a hobby, as has the editing that can add so much to a picture. Mark was kind enough to buy me a DSLR camera for my birthday this year, so I've been having a blast playing! There are occasional contests that I participate in just for fun, and I need some place to post my entries, so here they are. Hope you guys get a kick out of watching me learn!

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Friday, August 13, 2010

I Heart Faces - Fix-It Fridays, August 13, 2010

It's Fix-It Friday over at I Heart Faces, where we are given a photo to practice editing.  Here is my attempt at improving it.

The original (such gorgeous blue eyes!!):

8-13-10 Original

After my edits:

8-13-10 2

I did my edits in PS Elements 8, and these were the steps I took:

1. Cropped it.
2. Did a small levels and brightness/contrast adjustment.
3. Used the Adjust Color for Skin Tone tool in PSE (used Rita's Layer Mask action, and only adjusted the color on his face and hair because I liked the original color of the background).
4. Ran Coffee Shop action Baby Powder Room: Smooth Skin layer - touched up certain areas on his face (50% brush opacity); Skin Lighten layer - slightly lightened the shadows around his mouth (15% brush opacity); and used the Eye Define layer to sharpen his eyes (50% opacity).
5. Whitened his teeth a little by using the dodge tool, and a slight desaturation.
6. Darkened his eyes a bit using the burn tool.
5. Used the unsharp mask on his eyes: 65%, 1.7 Pixels; 0 Threshold

I now have this version:

8-13-10 1

And because I can't help myself, I had to pile on a couple more actions for fun:

- Ran Coffee Shop's LOMO action: LOMO layer @ 50% opacity, Black Color Fill layer @ 10% opacity, and turned the Vignette layer off.
- Ran Johnna Riddell's Whisper action, and turned both the Gradiant Map and Color Fill layers off. I left the other two layers as is.
- Ran Coffee Shop's S-Curve action at 15% opacity.
-Finally, I thought the effects were a little strong, so I added a layer of the cleaned up version above at 25% opacity.

This was what I ended up with:

8-13-10 2

As usual, all the actions I used were freebies from either Rita at the Coffeeshop, or Johnna Riddell. Both offer tons of cool actions for free, which I am eternally grateful for!! If you haven't already, check out their websites:

Coffee Shop: http://coffeeteaphotography.blogspot.com/
Johnna Riddel: http://johnnariddellphotography.blogspot.com/2010/03/once-upon-time-free-vintage-actions.html

To check out the other edits, visit www.iheartfaces.com.




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2 comments:

  1. UnknownAugust 13, 2010 at 3:06 PM

    Great job and your explanation of your editing is very thoughtful.

    ReplyDelete
  2. FionaAugust 13, 2010 at 3:31 PM

    Really good edits! Thanks for sharing! Love your blog too!

    ReplyDelete

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