I Heart Faces - Fix It Friday - Little Beauty



Every Friday, I Heart Faces hosts Fix It Friday (or Constructive Feedback Friday) to give photo enthusiasts a chance to fix someone else's photo with Photoshop (or other photo editing software).

Here is the original of this week's photo - Little Beauty:

iheartfaces_little_beauty_orig

Here is what I did to "fix" the photo:


  • Cropped it to line up with rule of thirds line
  • Did a levels adjustment – moved the black slider to the bottom of its hill
    iheartfaces_little_beauty_levels

     
  • Did an S curves adjustment using a curves adjustment layer

    iheartfaces_little_beauty_s_curve

     

  • Did an brightness adjustment layer

    These adjustments alone leave quite a pretty picture, such as you can see here:

    iheartfaces_little_beauty_fixed



I continued on, however. Here are the rest of my steps.


  • The hair in the image was now too green, so I did a color balance adjustment layer and on midtones (default) entered -10 for magenta/green and -10 for cyan/red
  • I flattened my image.
  • I ran a reduce noise filter – and chose 10 for strength, 50% for preserve details, 0% for reduce color noise, and 50% for sharpen details.
  • I brightened up the flowers by running a channel mixer adjustment layer at 120% red, -40% green, and 20% blue.
  • I ran a photo filter adjustment layer - a cooling filter (LBB) at 20%.
  • I ran an exposure adjustment layer – sliding it up for Exposure slightly (.4) and down for Gamma Correction (1.15).
  • I ran an unsharp mask (filter>sharpen>unsharp mask) at 150%, 1 pixel, and 5 levels.
  • Now, I zoomed into her face and fixed a couple of marks on her face wth the healing brush.
  • Finally, I chose Distort—Lens Coreection. to apply a vignette. I show two versions here. The first is vignette that lightens. Then, I trimmed the photo up. The second is a vignette that darkens.


iheartfaces_little_beauty_fixed1

iheartfaces_little_beauty_fixed2

4 comments:

angie {the arthur clan} said...

I love your step-by-step instructions. How nice for you to add that in! The vignette looks beautiful.

~Angie
co-founder of I ♥ Faces

Joanie said...

nice job. Great instructions, too.

Taylor said...

Great job, I love how soft it looks.

AJ said...

Very nice work!