Something Special Saturday

A tutorial to find the gray point in your photos:
An Easy Way To Find Neutral Gray

I ♥ Faces * Fix It Friday

This is the 8th week of 'Fix it Friday' over at the I Heart Faces blog, but only the first one I've ever participated in. One photo a week is submitted and people are allowed to do as they wish to fix it, post it on their blog and then link back. Anybody that knows me knows how much I love playing around with pictures and editing them. So when I found out about this, I just couldn't pass the opportunity by.



--original




--my play (Photoshop CS3)




--& here's a screen shot of the levels after I finished





I am not good with explaining AT ALL, but I will try :)

Just resized to 600px on the long size.

Used Kylie Banks' Photoshop action to crop following the rule of thirds.

Made the eye color pop. Slightly whitened teeth and smoothed skin with actions I wrote myself.

Used the clone tool to slightly lighten the shadows under her eyes.

For the color correct I:
*duplicated the image
*blur → average blur
*ctrl+i
*changed mode to 'color'
*reduced opacity to about 9%

To sharpen, I used 'Boutwell Magic Glasses' from Totally Rad Actions & 'Sharpen THIS' from The Pioneer Woman.

I then added a frame with an action I wrote myself.




*Photo credit: http://blacksalt.wordpress.com/ {the little girl in the photo is her daughter}

Hidden Photoshop Trick

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/409773/programmers_hidden_photoshop_trick/

If you go to the above link, you'll get to watch a really short video that shows a programmer's hidden trick inside of Photoshop. The man who made this video is using CS2 and says he doesnt know if it works in any other versions... well, I have CS3 & just tried it & Merlin, did indeed, pop up. Interesting and fun; just thought I'd pass it along.


----

& as a side note ~ my niece is still in the hospital. So please continue to keep her in your prayers/thoughts. Thanks!

My kiddos

Took these photos of my two on November 3rd.
This would be them if they were the stars of their own coloring book ;-)



^asleep in his car seat



^throwing a fit on the couch

From SOOC to Fully Edited

I'm really embarrassed to show this photo SOOC!! They're usually not this blah and ugly. I snapped it out the car window today (well, technically yesterday... I just havent been to bed and it's a new day) as we were driving by, and didnt have the time to adjust the settings in manual mode. Had I tried, I would have missed the opportunity to even get the photo at all. So, ya take what you can get.... riiiiiight?!!

I did not like this photo at all when I uploaded them onto my computer tonight. It just looked so... well, like I said before, blah and ugly! I could have scrapped the photo and not thought twice about it. But, I didnt! I thought it had some potential --just needed a little lovin' to make it look alright!


^Here is the SOOC;
only resized to 600px on the long side to share here.



^Here it is having only been edited in ACR;
& resized to 600px on the long side to share on here.



^Here is the photo with my normal editing done to it.
Some of the steps:
•Cropped;
resized to 600px on the long side.
•Cloned out the house with the red roof.
•Original layer duplicated;
soft light on top layer,
lower opacity,
merge.
•Sponged the whole photo on saturate to bring out the colors.
•Messed with the hue/sat to pop the colors a little bit more.
•Sky was too light for my liking, so I burned it.
•Used the sponge/burn/dodge tools throughout photo;
helped to add extra highlights and shadows where I wanted.
•Defogged and sharpened the image.



^Here is the final editing I did to the image.
Sometimes, I like to do extra editing on images to just spruce them up a bit more. This was one of those photos that I thought would benefit from doing so.
Some of my steps (using the last image):
•I blurred the sky to give it a more soft appearance.
•I duplicated the image twice;
high pass sharpen, set to overlay, lowered opacity,
duplicated, set to linear light, lowered opacity,
merged.
•Duplicated layer;
added gaussian blur,
set to overlay,
duplicated layer,
set to soft light,
lowered opacity,
merged.
•Sharpened.

Before and After

It stinks being sick. What stinks even more is being 38 weeks pregnant and sick at the same time!

Arrgh...

So, I thought I'd pull out a shot from March 21st and see what kinda funky editing I could do with it in Photoshop.

Here's the results :-)









--Oh, and I just need to clarify... my shots are usually not that underexposed and just blah. Dont know what was up with my mind that day when I was taking the shots.

Vote for the WORST Photo!!

Seriously!!

Here's a fun contest that's going on over at Kylie's blog :-)

http://www.phauntactions.com/blog/?p=215 <---- will take you directly to the post

Vote, vote, vote!

I have an entry, but I'm not saying which one b/c that wouldn't be fair. I think they're all great though *lol*


*Edit: Saturday, October 13th, 2008 2:33 a.m.*

The contest is now over so I will share that my entry was number 9 :-) Congratulations to the three winners!! & thanks to Kylie for the fun contest!