Fix-It Friday

This week's Fix It Friday photo was a beauty, but required a fair bit of tweaking. This photo is from the I <3 Faces blog and was not taken by me. The post-processing is my work.

Before:


After:


The steps I took- using Photoshop CS4- are as follows:
1. Use Cooling #80 filter at 20%.
2. Lighten the photo significantly using Curves.
3. Use the PW Boost action and lower the opacity to the desired level.
4. Flatten the image.
5. Use the healing brush to touch up imperfections. I removed the red spot from below his eye, the bags under his eye, and a fleck of something (though it might just be a freckle...) on his chest.
6. Use PW's Bring On The Eyes action.
7.Flatten the image again.
8. Use the Vibrance slider to achieve the desired colour saturation (I brought it up to +37.)
9. Use Curves again to lighten every so slightly.
10. Use Levels to darken up the black tones a little bit.

I Heart Faces

Have you seen the I Heart Faces blog? It's built around portrait photography and I love to browse it.

On Fix-It Fridays, they post an image that needs a little help, and it's up to the readers of the blog to give it a little boost.

Here's this week's image.



Just a reminder- I didn't take this image. I've just made myself in charge of playing with it.

Anyway, remember a few days ago when I told you about The Pioneer Woman's Actions for Photoshop? Well, those played a big part in my fix-up:



I edited the photo this way:
1. Crop.
2. Fresh and Colourful. Adjust opacity of "soft light" layer.
3. Boost. Adjust opacity.
4. Bring On The Eyes.
5. Flatten image.
6. Adjust Hue/Saturation. Select "Reds" and crank up the saturation. Adjust blues and crank up the saturation even more.
7. Clone out the pesky mossy tree thing and make it look like it was never there.

The end! That whole edit takes only a few minutes. If you haven't made friends with Photoshop (I'm using CS4, but they're all good) then you really, really need to.

Photoshop Actions

For those of you interested in photography and who use Photoshop:

One of my personal favourite bloggers, Ree Drummond (AKA The Pioneer Woman) has released two sets of Photoshop actions, custom-made with the help of Totally Rad Actions. I'm not generally a fan or a user of actions, but some of these are very, very nice. They're also available free for download from her website- http://www.thepioneerwoman.com/photography

Here's a few before-and-afters of the actions in action.

Vintage:


Boost and PW's B+W:


Colorize and Boost:



It takes a bit of playing to figure out which action works with which photo, but once you figure it out, they're really very nice. I highly recommend hopping over to PW's website and downloading them for yourself. They're free- why not? Enjoy!

As well, I've changed my website slightly again tonight. After purchasing a Macbook this week, I realized that the particular layout I was using gets cropped on smaller-format computers; the new site has been tested with Mac (iMac and Macbook) and PCs (laptop and desktop) and should work just fine. Please let me know if you find any bugs!