Last night, I came home…checked my email…signed on the Bump Photography Board…and there it was, an editing challenge. I’m like pavlov’s dog when it comes to editing challenges, so I had to jump in. Unfortunately, a few of the other girls had already mastered the edit using Lightroom, Photoshop (using Portraiture) and Noiseware. I thought that I’d try to reproduce the edit in Photoshop Elements, but I felt that my initial edit came up short. Let me tell you, I was discouraged!
FYI: My goal with “before and after” challenges is to demonstrate that Photoshop Elements can be an incredibly useful tool for hobby photographers, like me. I hope that I have proven that you can do most of what you need to do (from a post-processing/editing perspective) for under $100.
With that said, I put on my big girl britches and decided to try again. Needless to say, I am pleased with the results.
- I started by opening the RAW file in Camera Raw (a plug-in for PSE) – I did have to update my .8bi file to support the file, but that only took a couple of minutes.
- In Camera Raw, I adjusted the white balance and exposure, and added fill light. I also cropped and straightened the file.
- I then opened it up in PSE.
- I ran Squeaky Clean just to clean it up a little more before running any actions (I really didn’t have to do much tweaking).
- Then, I ran Coffeeshop’s Baby Powder Room to clean up their little faces a bit (I ran each layer at a really low opacity, but did not use the eye bright layers).
- I used Pioneer Woman’s Bring Out the Eyes action on their eyes (I just like this action a little better).
- I then used Pioneer Woman’s Slight Light (lowered to about 50%) to brighten up the picture a little more.
- I did a combination of cloning and healing to get rid of the plexiglass line.
- I then used the quick selection tool to select the girls – then selected the inverse. I created a duplicate layer.
- On that duplicate layer, I did a gaussian blur filter. I added a layer mask and used a soft black brush at 40% opacity to paint around the edges of the girls bodies so that they weren’t blurry. Why did I do this? – because I don’t have noiseware and this made the picture less grainy.
- Finally, before posting to my blog, I ran a resize and sharpen action.
Is my edit as good as the ones I saw last night…maybe not, but I think this is a huge improvement and again proves how much can be accomplished with Photoshop Elements. By the way, I think this picture is super duper adorable.
