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:

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
  
  
   
  
• Did an S curves adjustment using a curves adjustment layer
  

  
  
   
  
  

• Did an brightness adjustment layer
  
  

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

  
  
  

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.
  

Cross Processing

I love to learn new things. I just learned about cross processing. Here is a good tutorial on it. Cross processing basically adds more contrast to already contrasty pictures - making them POP. In a nutshell, you take your picture, you apply a regular S curve to your RGB in curves. Then you apply an S curve to your red channel and your green channel. Finally, you apply an inverted S curve to your blue channel. And voila - it's cross processed. See the tutorial if that doesn't make sense to you. One, warning, you might want to make your curves slightly shallow or it may look over-processed. Adjust to your tastes. It's all a matter of tastes.

Here is my cross processed picture of a couple of turtles (at the BIRD sanctuary):

Here is my original. I also applied an unsharp mask to the photo and applied the rule of thirds to my photo as Alyssa so clearly explains in this tutorial.