Fix It Friday - Little Girl & Doll

It's Fix It Friday over at I Heart Faces. This picture with the girl and her doll is precious, and captures perfectly what being a little girl is about. I have two renditions for Fix It Friday: one with increased contrast, texture, and a text; the other in black and white.

Here's the original.

Here's the color "Fix It".

Here's the black and white.

I Heart Faces - Redhead Fix-It

The Fix-It photo this week at I Heart Faces was fun and easy to work with. I just love how red-heads pop in photos don't you?

Here is the original:

Here is the fix:

I applied very easy and common fixes I often use on photos.

• I applied a custom curve to the photo by applying a curves adjustment layer and pulling up the curve a little (like an arch).
  
  

  This photo needed to be lightened a little - this is the most effective way I know to do this in Photoshop. In Photoshop you can apply a curves adjustment layer by going over to the layer pallete and choosing the half black/half white circle, right clicking on it, and choosing curves.

  
  
• Then I applied a brightness/contrast adjustment layer, adjusting the contrast to 50%.
  

  Because of the slightly foggy look of the photo, upping the contrast a little was helpful for this particular photo. However, if I hadn't lightened the photo enough, upping the contrast would have looked dark.
  

• Then I applied a levels adjustment layer to the photo, pulling the grey slider to the right a little.
  

  I did this so that the midtones in the photo would be a little more rich. If you were to pull up the blacks, you would have lost some of the rich colors.
  

• I, then, flattened the image.
  
  
  
• I duplicated the image.
  
  
  
• I applied a strong sharpen on the top layer - something like 250%, 3 pixels, and level 5.
  
  
  
• Then I applied a alt-add vector mask to this top layer I just sharpened. This gets me a black vector mask that will hide my layer, with the exception of areas I paint with white to have the layer show through. I set my paintbrush opacity to 50% and paint the eyes (just the dark circle portion of the eye, not the whites or the eyelashes).
  
  
  
• If I like how the eyes look and they seem to blend, I'll leave what I've got. If it need to be toned down slightly, I'll adjust the opacity of the top layer (the one with the alt-layer mask applied to it), by making sure that top layer is selected and using the opacity slide feature by moving the mouse over the word "Opacity" in the "Layers Pallete".
  
  
  
• I'll flatten my image and apply a final mild sharpen to the entire image - something like 50%, 2px, level 5.
  
  
  
• That's it!
  

I hope you enjoyed the walk through of my fix.

Fix It Friday - Pretty In Ponytails

This week's Fix It Friday was a little girls with pony tails. I like to find a new skill I can learn with Photoshop when I work on a Fix It Friday image. This week I learned how to do a fade to transparent on an image in Photoshop. Here is the tutorial I used: Fade Images In Photoshop Using Layer Masks.

Here is the original image this week:

Here is the fixed version:

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.
  

I Heart Faces - Fix It Friday - A Day At The Park

I really enjoy these Fix It Friday assignments at I Heart Faces. It seems like each week, I'm trying new tweaks on new images. Unfortunately, since I was playing around so much, I can't even begin to tell you the steps I took. I hope you enjoy my fix though.

Here is the fixed image:

Here is the original:

Fix It Friday - Baby Picture

I Heart Faces is featuring a cute little baby picture to fix with Photoshop for Fix It Friday.

Here is the original:

Here is my first fix - a sharpened up color version:

Here is my second fix - a mostly black and white version, with a touch of color and a blue tint.

Here is my third fix - a black and white conversion with a blown out look. I just love the blown out look with babies. You can read about how I do this here.

Fix It Friday - Original, Black & White Fix, Color Fix, Texture

Here are my fixes for iheartfaces.com's Fix-It-Friday.

Here is the original:

Here is my Black & White fix:

Here is my Color fix:

Here is one with Texture and a Vignette:

Fix It Friday - Black & White, Color, Desaturated

It's Fix-It Friday at iheartfaces.com. I love doing this because I get a chance to play around with someone else's images other than my own.

Here is the original image, which I think is a great image to begin with:

Below is my black and white conversion for this. I couldn't use my stand-by black and white conversion method by itself on this one because the green of the outfit didn't show up dark enough in my conversion. So, I used a combination of methods.

First, I duplicated my layers and partially converted to black and white with the channel mixer, by clicking monochrome in that tool and playing around with it until the green outfit was nice and dark, and stood out from the background. I made this layer partially opaque and combined my layers. Then I used my standby method:

Changing to lab color, then grabbing the lightness channel, then converting to greyscale, then selecting, then selecting the inverse, then going back to RGB, then adding a solid color, choosing black, and reducing the opacity of that layer.

Then the look of the girl's skin was a little off. I had saved a copy of the channel mixer version of the black and white image. I copied this into a new layer. I selected that layer and chose alt-channel mixer button (square with round circle in it). I painted out her skin in select spots to make the tones normal looking. And combined my images. I also did some sharpening.

Here's the "fixed" Black & White version.

Here's my fixed color version. First off, I made a selection of the girl and saved it seperately and changed the curves, color balance, and levels independently. Then I took the main image and altered the background to my liking without worrying about the effect on the girl. I did a numbere of things - exposure, curves, color balance, and levels. One thing of note that I did to the background is that I selected a color out of the wall behind the girl and added a solid color to that background using a similar color as the orange rust circle on the wall. I, of course, had done this on a duplicated layer and so I then reduced the opacity of the orange effect until I liked it. After combining this main image, I adjusted the sharpness using Unsharp Mask on the main image (independently of the girl). I copied the girl back into this image, flattened the image, and then fine tweaked the final sharpness.

To desaturate this, I chose Hue/Saturation a couple of times and desaturated in there for select colors.

Fix It Friday

Here are two more fixes. Converted to black and white - one I kept the blue of the eyes, but lowered the opacity.

I did a second fix of the photo. I can't explain what I did differently except when I did a layer to sharpen the eyes I also fixed the layer for intense blues in the eyes. Then I painted in just the eyes on that layer using a layer mask. Then I adjusted the skin tones a little at the end. I also rotated it and cropped it. Here is my second fix:

iheartfaces.com hosts a weekly challenge to "fix" a photo. This weeks photo is entitled "beautiful blues". So here is my fix:

This is my fix.

This is the original.

I won't totally take you step by step through what I did, but here is a summary:

I applied several adjustment layers - curves, levels, color balance, channel mixer. I combined my layers. I applied sharpen to one layer just for the eyes. Then I created a layer mask using alt-the layer mask button (circle inside a square on your layers palette), and I painted with white just over (the dark part of) the eyes. I combined the layers and used the spot healing brush on little spots of food on her face and teeth. Then I applied a final sharpen.