i heart faces fix-it Friday

Not too long ago, I discovered a couple things. I discovered Google Reader. I had no idea one could follow blogs in one place like that. I had wished for such a thing, but I'd never asked. Can't believe I took so long to catch up. Now I get a daily dose of photography heaven--or overload.

I also discovered, among the many wonderful photography websites out there, i heart faces, a cool site about shooting people. (haha) Every Friday, readers get a chance to flex their processing muscles with a submitted photo. With my recent addition of Lightroom 3 and a fast new computer to my editing lineup (here is where the angels start to sing), I thought I'd give it a go.

This week's shot is an adorable little girl by Amy Locurto of Atomic Egg Photography (what a name! You'll remember that, won't you?) The focus was slightly off, but otherwise, was a dream image to work with.

Original:


Edited:


Now to try to remember what all I did...
I imported the image to Lightroom and made these adjustments:
Temp +31
Tint +22
Exposure +.05
Fill 10
Blacks 13
Contrast +19
Vibrance +79
Saturation -33
HUE
Red +27 (I dunno why, it just looked cool.)
SATURATION
Yellow +59 (brought out color of bows)
Green +2
Blue +59 (brought out color of dress)
LUMINANCE
Orange +34 (Took cast off face and made it glow)
Green +2
SPLIT TONING HIGHLIGHTS
Hue 50
Sat 11
Balance -11
SPLIT TONING SHADOWS
Hue 240
Sat 10
(I had no method to split toning, I just slid it around to see what it would do.)

I busted out the ultra-cool adjustment brush here and brightened up under her eyes a smidge, brushed the iris pop over her eyes, then brightened skin around the chin that was shadowed.

Then I opened it up in paint Shop Pro and added a texture from Muffet on Flickr. It warmed the background, but I mostly masked it off her face. I added a vignette using curves. Then I ran the high pass sharpen at radius 4 and 100 strength, overlay mode, on a duplicate, using layer masks so that the sharpening affected her eyes as well as her hair and mouth at a reduced opacity.

I like the brownish overall tone complimented by the pop of yellow and blue. and I think I got her eyes looking pretty nice--that was all LR adjustment brush and high-pass sharpen.

Sounds like a lot, but it really didn't take all that long. This is a really cool exercise to see what I can do with editing and help me to see what sorts of photos work well with what styles of editing. It's also nice to write down what I'm doing so I can come back to analyze and learn. Hopefully, I'll keep up with Fix-it Friday. :) Heck, it will give my pretty blog some action.