Fix it Friday #73 – Susan Keller’s Tutorial

Written by: Susan Keller from Susan Keller Photography

Software Used: Lightroom 2.4 (LR) & Photoshop CS3 (PS)
Actions/Presets/Textures Used: Totally Rad (TRA)

I do love me some presets and actions, but I thought I’d challenge myself to do my first fix (shown above) without any, and my second fix with just one preset. Oh, and I worked off the JPG for each fix.

So, there’s not much wrong with this picture. I love the composition and content. The only thing that bugs me is the shoot-in-the-shade effect – the darkness and “coolness” of the image. My only goal is to warm it up (remove the blue cast – make sure her white onesie actually looks white!), brighten it, and make it pop a little. Here are the steps I took:

1. First, some brightening … I duplicated the background (Ctrl or Command J), set it to screen mode, 34% opacity.
2. Then to adjust the white balance and add a little contrast, I added a Curves adjustment layer, playing with the separate curves til I got this:

3. There was still some residual blue coloring on the white shirt, so I added a hue/saturation adjustment layer and made the following corrections:
Cyans lightness +38 and Blues lightness +38.
4. Ran a high pass filter to sharpen. That’s it.

The next “fix” was super simple. Just TRA’s BW preset: Riot Juice.

Orange County Baby, Child & Family Photographer

I totally love a great roadtrip adventure with my dudes, or a cozy afternoon curled up with a good book. “Reality” tv totally sucks me in. I prefer my chocolate to be semi-sweet and my Diet Coke to have a squirt of root beer in it. Photography makes my heart sing and waterskiing leaves me sore & limping but deeply satisfied.