It's another "Fix it Friday" over at I Heart Faces!
This time it was a real challenge with bright highlights and some focus issues to try to correct.
Here is the original by Keli Hoskins.
I tried to keep detailed notes about all the steps that I took in Lightroom 2 and Photoshop CS3. Although when I was trying to get the exposure on the face right I did a bit of that without writing down exactly... so it's a little bit approximate when it comes to that area of the photo.
The photo started off in Lightroom.
My first edit:
I cropped a bit to remove the walkway lamp, upped the temperature to 5333 and changed the tint to 14.
I pushed the recovery slider to 100, and brought the brightness down to 46.
I upped the saturation to 19, luminance to 26 and blacks to 10.
Here's where I started fussing with the adjustment brush on "exposure". On the bright edge of the face, the hat and the foot I did a layer set at -.25. On the brightest edge of the chair I did a layer set at -1. Then I brightened the entire face with a layer at +.2. It didn't seem to be enough so I did another layer on all of the face except the brightest edge at +.4.
At this point I duplicated the photo so I could do another edit, then opened this edit in Photoshop. I duplicated the layer I ran a "high pass" filter on the top layer, set it's mode as "overlay", then erased everything except the face and the center of the hat (the outer edges of the hat I erased to give it a more gradual sharpening effect. That way the face is sharpened, but not the rest of the photo.
Then I added a subtle vignette (I will do a tutorial post on that soon), and a little blur tool on the cheeks to soften them.
My second edit:
This was a duplicate of my first edit after I fixed the highlight problem in the face.
I cropped closer to focus on the face and hands. (Do you see those adorable drool bubbles?)
I played a little bit with the levels of the colors under the "grayscale" menu in Lightroom.
I also upped the contrast to 30.
Then I brought the photo into Photoshop, did the same sharpening, blurring and vignette.
That was fun! And I think I was actually pretty successful with evening out the highlights on the face!
-----------------------------------
Now for an update -- I've been making slow but steady progress on the most beautiful chair. But now I have to wait for some supplies to come in the mail. Darn, I hate waiting! But I'm so excited to finally finish it (and post the step by step)!
hmmm... Love the insight into your edits! It is always nice to see the paths people take to editing. Great work!
ReplyDelete