I’m excited to link up with The Bonnie 5 for Touch-Up Tuesday. You guys know I love Before & After posts, so this (along with Pixel Perfect’s Before and After) will allow me a forum for delivering these types of posts. Bonnie joked with me last week that although she’s excited that I’m joining, that everyone will wonder why I’m not hosting this challenge myself. One day…
I always start my photos in ACR – I made a couple of exposure, contrast and brightness adjustments before bringing it over to PSE7. As usual, I also ran Amy McMaster’s Squeaky Clean action (secret: I always adjust my levels – sliding my mid-range up to 1.26 or higher, I also always adjust the saturation by decreasing my reds and yellows).
From there, I ran Coffeeshop Photography’s Baby Powder Room to even out Stella’s skin tone. I haven’t used this action in a while, but I really didn’t feel like replicating these steps manually. For those of you new to actions, you can’t simply click and go – you need to click on each layer and adjust, color in or color out (if you need more explanation, just let me know). Within this action, there is a step for eye define. Although her eyes are closed, I did use this layer slightly over her eyelashes to make them stand out just a touch.
At this point, I worked on the background. This was a little tedious. I think I used the quick selection tool to select that dark spot in the upper left corner. I created a new layer by clicking ctrl J. I then made a copy of the background layer (ctrl J) and moved this layer to the top layer. I used a combination of the healing tool and cloning tool to even out the space. I then merged those layers and used the quick selection tool to reselect the entire background. I made the background it’s own layer, then went to filter, blur, gaussian blur to blur the background.
Finally, I applied Amy McMaster’s Apricot Cream action for a nice creamy finish before resizing and sharpening. If you have any questions, just send them my way (you can use the contact form at the top of the page). Now, go check out more Touch-Up Tuesday submissions:
