Fix-It Friday #32

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Before to After)

Whew! Let me just say…this was a tough one! The main issue I found with this photo was the harsh shadows. These shadows can be lightened up, but one has to be careful to not over-do it. The human eye is very discerning. The way the light is directed in this picture, the eye knows that there should be shadows. If the shadows are taken away, the photo starts to look very fake. This is what I discovered in my edits. I way overdid it at first, and it wasn’t looking natural at all. To fix this, I layered the original photo overtop of my editing and reduced the opacity down. This brought back some of the natural shadowing to make the photo look less “Photoshopped”.

Here are the other steps I took:

1. Opened in RAW and made some major edits in lighting. The photo that resulted looks very strange:

2. I opened this photo and the original in Elements. I copied the original and pasted over the above photo. I then used a layer mask action (from Coffeeshop) and painted in only the shadowed areas. I then flattened the layers.

3. Duplicated the new picture twice. For the middle layer, I changed the blending mode to “Screen”. I then added a layer’s mask to the top layer. Once again, I painted in the shadowed areas to bring more light. (This was where I started discovering that perhaps I was bringing in too much light. My fix for this was mentioned above.)

4. The next step was to take care of the triangle of light under the shadowed section of her eyes. I actually took a triangle of skin from her cheek using the wand, copied it and pasted it over her eyes in a new layer. I decreased the opacity way down, erased areas and then flattened the layers. I then used the healing brush around the perimeter of the new section for blending. This is similar to what the patch tool does in the full version of Photoshop. I then used the clone stamp and healing brush to make some further slight adjustments.

5. Used the healing brush to take away a few flaws on the face. (stray hair, baby acne, some drool) I then saved the photo.

6. Opened the photo in the free community version of Noiseware and reduced the noise using the strong color noise option. I saved this new photo and opened it again in Photoshop.

7. Adjusted the pink tones using a hue adjustment layer. I used the layer mask with it to really focus only on the hands and part of the skin. I wanted the skirt to still have bright pinks.

8. Ran Rita’s new S-Curve action (Coffeeshop) and reduced the opacity to 25%.

9. Used Pioneer Woman’s method for sharpening eyes.

10. Ran a Defog action to sharpen up the photo.

11. Adjusted the skin tone.

12. Did some boosting of saturation and contrast and slight adjustment of the levels.

13. Cloned out the wall and replaced with the flooring.

14. There you go! That got me to the final product:

Just for fun…I’ve added a 12x12 scrapbook page made with the free kits Promise and Shabby Mommy from Shabby Princess.

This page literally took me five minutes to make because I used a pre-made page from the kit “Shabby Mommy”. (I changed the hue of it slightly.) I then added a sanded overlay from the same kit and the words from the “Promise” kit. (I clip-masked the words with scrapbooking paper.) Easy-peasy!

 

Now I have to get back to college work.  I have the day “off” tomorrow…which means my sister is going to watch the kiddos while I take an exam and write two papers.   It’s going to be a fun day!  :)