Fix-It Friday #62 – Julie Rivera’s Contribution
Written By Julie Rivera of Julie Rivera Photography
Amy Locurto shared this absolutely adorable picture of her daughter for us to work on this week. Aside from wanting a cute little girl like hers, who wants one of these chairs? I do!! The expression of happiness, the contrast of fun colors and the tilted angle all work together for a rich, fun image. The dappled light filtering through the trees is a bit distracting, so I will work to reduce its appearance.
We started with this image SOOC:
I opened it using Adobe Camera Raw (Command+R in Mac) and adjusted the following:
Temperature +3, Exposure +0.65 and Blacks to 7
I also reduced the saturation of the yellow to -8
I then had this image that I brought into Photoshop CS3:
All images come into PS at huge dimensions, like 48″x32″. So I set the crop tool to 4×6 at 600 ppi and crop the image. In this case, I cropped and rotated the crop box a bit to change the look of the picture ever so slightly.
I zoomed in on her face and used Totally Rad Action‘s Pro Retouch (which I think is available as a free download on their website! Oh! Free stuff!) I used a 41% brush on both the skin and the eye layer, then flattened.
I created a Duplicate Layer from the background then used the Patch Tool to eliminate the deep undereye shadows. I reduced the opacity of the layer to 74%. Flatten.
I used TRA‘s Yin/Yang action, which lightens and darkens the areas you choose. In this case, I lightened, with a 22% brush, her face and arms. I darkened, with a 45% brush, the grass areas. Flatten.
I also used TRA‘s Big Blue with a 47% brush on the grass to further darken the tone. I applied TRA’s Oh, Snap! over the Big Blue, reducing the Contrast Layer to 50% and the overall action opacity to 74%. Flatten.
I applied a Curves layer and raised the midpoint of the line to brighten the entire image. I then went back with a brush and erased the effect off everything but the girl. I reduced the layer’s opacity to 77%.
I still felt the grass was too yellow, so I added a Hue/Saturation Layer and adjusted the yellows: Hue +6 and Saturation -35. I erased the effect from the girl and the chair, as it made them too subdued for my taste. Flatten.
I then cropped to 5×7 and resized for web.
And here is our finished product:
