Before & After: Part 1
I have at least three Before & Afters for you today – the first of which is this beautiful Korean-mixed (because I don’t know how else to say it) American baby. I’m telling ya, this kid is going to be a heart breaker one day. This is another example of a sweet moment captured on camera…and I decided with this one to get artistic. Of course, there’s always that fine line of artistic and jacked up…I guess you’ll have to tell me if I crossed that line. So here it is:
I walked through my normal post-processing steps on this one: 
  1. Adjusted curves slightly.
  2. Ran Squeaky Clean and adjusted each layer accordingly (like all actions, and I don’t mention this enough, (if you’re able) you really need to adjust the layers – I rarely just run an action and move on). 
  3. Repositioned, cropped and stretched the canvas on the left side of the image.
  4. Cloned and healed the shirt (I think somewhere in my texture process, it got blurry…sorry).
  5. Ran Baby Powder Room to even out his skin tone – if this was just a snap shot, I probably wouldn’t have done much here, but I was going for more of a portrait look.
  6. Ran Pioneer Woman’s Bring Out the Eyes action.
  7. Applied 2 textures – set one to soft light and the other to overlay and lowered their opacity. 
  8. Applied Paint the Moon’s Sugar Cookies action and adjusted the layers until I felt good about the coloring and style. 
  9. I added a light pink overlay at 14% opacity and removed the color from his eyes.
  10. I then added two duplicate layers. On the first one, I ran the burn tool over his little face to bring back a few of the details (after going through the steps above, I felt like it was missing a little bit of detail…I also thought he was looking casperesqe. On the second layer, I ran the burn tool around the edges of the photo as well as the edges of his shirt and hairline to create some separation between him and the background.
  11. And finally, before I post to the web, I re-size and sharpen.
Whew, I’m tired…any questions?
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