I Heart Faces #30

Well, here it is Friday again and I have been playing with the new PS Elements 8…
I needed to take a break and thought it would be fun to play along again.

Here is the original photo for week #30 at I Heart Faces. You can see right off that the image is under-exposed and will need some work on the exposure and possibly the noise levels.

So, here is where I began…
I started with bringing up the exposure by using a levels adjustment. After bringing a little more light to the photo, I next used a filter – I Correct Portrait. The filter allowed me to correct the skin tones and pick the white levels. I also used a little brightening within the filter. This got the photo to what I would call a “base” working photo.  Now that I had a little more to work with, I decided a crop would work best and cropped the photo, which also allowed me to straighten the little boy in the photo. This is when I started tweaking the image a bit… I used the EZ Actions ContraSoft Photoshop action. The ContraSoft action added a little pop to the photo and softened the skin (which also removed some of the noise).  One other step I added (beyond using the action) was to use a technique called “dark eye brighten” – which essentially adds some light colored lines (which are then blurred) into the eyes to bring some life.

Here is the result of my work through those steps:

The photo looked ok to me there, but I wanted to play a bit more… So, after trying some black and white conversion actions, nothing really stood out to me. So, I thought… what about a Midnight Color effect? I ran the Midnight Color Pro action on the softened version of the photo and I liked how it came out. After running the action, all I did was duplicate the layer (the midnight color layer) so that there were 2 layers. I increased the size of the background layer and blurred it… I decreased the size of the photo layer, added a little border and drop shadow, and rotated it slightly…

Here was my final result:

I hope you like the results…

Thanks for visiting and I’ll talk to you later,
John

Elliott

On a recent trip to Kentucky, I took some photos of some horses… This is Elliott…
Elliott is being trained to become a police horse. He’s only a year old, but he is learning quickly.

I took a minute or two and played with the photo using the Sharp Shot Color Pop pro action from EZ Actions. Below, you can see the original photo (as shot) and the resulting edit (before and after). I’ve overlayed the 2 photos and created this animated photo.

Thanks for stopping by…
Talk to you soon…
John

Fix-it Friday #29

I have been enjoying the “Fix-it Fridays” at I Heart Faces…
This is for #29…

Original photo:

Here is my edit…
I used the healing brush (and a little cloning tool) to remove the sun spots on her face. Then, I ran the ContraSoft action from EZ Actions to pop the color and used the paint with light functionality to brighten the eyes and darken the background.  Then, I added the fairy and the stars… I ended up adding the border by increasing the canvas size… This was the result:

I think it came out really nice…

Talk to you later,
John

Fix-it Friday #28

I thought I’d play again this week…

I thought that a crop would look best for this photo. I used the healing brush to touch up a few spots and then used some actions from EZ Actions to further tweak the image. I converted it to sepia using the Pro Sepia action and used the built-in paint with light capability to brighten the eyes a touch.

Here is the original image:

Here is my edit:

Fix-it Friday #27

I ran across this site that has a “Fix-it Friday” photo and I thought it would be interesting to play and give it a shot.

This is the original:

Here is one fix that I would call Little Boy Blue…

I created this by modifying the original. I used a softening action from EZ Actions (ContraSoft). Then I ran the Pro Sapphire Blue action (also from EZ Actions). I took advantage of the paint with light capability in the actions to add some light to the face of this sweet child and darken the background a bit.

I also ran the Polaroid Transfer action and ended up with this version (I also added a grunge border).

This was a fun challenge… I may try to play more often…

Talk to you later,
John