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:
- Adjusted curves slightly.
- 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).
- Repositioned, cropped and stretched the canvas on the left side of the image.
- Cloned and healed the shirt (I think somewhere in my texture process, it got blurry…sorry).
- 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.
- Ran Pioneer Woman’s Bring Out the Eyes action.
- Applied 2 textures – set one to soft light and the other to overlay and lowered their opacity.
- Applied Paint the Moon’s Sugar Cookies action and adjusted the layers until I felt good about the coloring and style.
- I added a light pink overlay at 14% opacity and removed the color from his eyes.
- 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.
- And finally, before I post to the web, I re-size and sharpen.
