Fix it Friday #84 - I {Heart} Faces - Highlights Fixed! - Photo Edits

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)!