Fix-It Friday #63 – Jessica Paige’s Contribution

Written by Jessica Paige

I LOVE this sweet moment Angie captured between her daughter and with her best friend!  I love that it makes you curious about what they are pointing at and talking about.  I was thrilled to process it (although in  my opinion, it didn’t need much)… Thank you for sharing it with us Angie!

ORIGINAL

EDITED

Here is my editing process:

I opened the image in Photoshop, cropped it slightly (although for print I probably would have kept the original crop).  I created a duplicate layer on the original background (Layer-duplicated layer).  From here I used the spot tool and sparingly corrected a few little skin spots (only the ones that may show up more because of processing, I try to keep the images as natural as possible).

Then I corrected the exposure a bit by creating a levels adjustment layer.  I wanted to pull down some of the blown areas and add in some shadows.  White is very difficult to photograph outside (in this case the little girls dress has some blown areas, but I think it’s acceptable because much of the dress still held detail).  When photographing white outdoors, my suggestion would be to slightly under-expose and see if that helps eliminate some of the blown highlights.

Next I ran Vintage Wash from Eye Candy Actions at 90% opacity.  I tweaked the layers and used layer masks to get the look I was hoping for.

I noticed that that there was a pink color cast from the pink dress falling on to the white dress so using selective color adjustment layer- I adjusted the “white” by pulling back the magenta and blacks in that color selection.  When I did that, it lightened the dress so I created a curves adjustment layer- pulled down the highlights- inverted the layer mask (command I on my Mac) and painted over the dress using a soft brush.

To put the finishing touches on the image… I ran Clarify at 22% opacity by Eye Candy Actions to defog and enhance the details. I used a layer mask to remove it from the grass, skin and background.  Then I added a soft vignette by running the Burnt Out action from Eye Candy on 41% opacity.  Finally, I ran a quick noise reduction (Filter-Noise-Reduce Noise) and Sharpened.  Beautiful!  :)

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