Friday, February 20, 2009

Fix It Friday

I thought I would give this a try. I am not at all a master at the editing part of digital photography, but the more practice I get the better...right? iHeartFaces does this every Friday. They pick one image from the week and give people a chance to play with it. Here is what I came up with:

Original Image:

My Fix:
Here is what I did:

The first thing I did was use a noise reduction process from Noiseware (free download). Then, I opened it up in PSE 5.0. I cropped the image and placed the subject on the right side of the photo (using a little "rule of thirds"). I then used the Healing Brush to eliminate blemishes. I highlighted her eyes using the Dodge Tool, made her lips a bit darker using the Burn Tool (all with midtones). Then, I used the Blur Tool to make some of the edges softer. I also played with the lighting a little bit to lighten the picture and changed the saturation for a washed out appearance. Finally, I created a background layer, gave it a Gaussian Blur (thanks to my friend Tiffany teaching me how to do this a few weeks ago), and set the transparency to 25%. To complete it, I flattened the image (layers)...and this is what I ended up with. By no means am I an expert...actually this is about all I know how to do.

Lots of other people have played with this photo too! Check them out at iHeartFaces if you have a chance!

5 comments:

Leslie West said...

wow, she looks like a porceline doll in this picture....great job!

angie {the arthur clan} said...

I love the soft quality you gave this photo. It's so fun seeing my daughter's face "fixed up" all over the web. :) Great job!

~Angie
co-founder of I ♥ Faces

Melinda said...

I love how soft and muted your photo is! Great job!

Carebear said...

Awesome job. The eyes and skin look great. THank you so much for the detailed how to. I'm going to see if I can do similar in GIMP. Glad to see you used Elements with such great results. You're the 5th Elements fix-it I've viewed today, so maybe I'll give up saving for PS4 and buy elements now!

Teresa said...

Beautiful edit! Your colors are wonderful, and evrything looks so pretty. Love the gaussian blur layer for softness. Nice work, and thank you for sharing how you did it!