It’s time for another fix-it Friday! I’m blogging this at almost 3 AM, so no run-through today, though I might hop on later in the day and put a few adjustments on this blog post. For now, enjoy the images. The original is above and my edits below.
Enjoy!
Be sure to sneak a peek at the Senior session photo I posted earlier tonight.
I absolutely cannot hold off on posting this image any longer. I was going to include it with a big post but I think it stands alone. This is one of those pictures I’d “seen” in my mind’s eye before we even set out on the golf cart; I even tried to describe it to him while I was directing where to stand and look but I don’t think my words even came close to this. Pre-visualizing portraits and seeing them work exactly, exactly as you wanted is such a great feeling.
To me, this image epitomizes the place he is in life — on the edge of greatness, on top of the world, with the future wide open.
I am getting so excited to post more from this session once I get all the proofs to his mom, soon, very soon.
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[...] sure to sneak a peek at the Senior session photo I posted earlier [...]
I am not a fan of tilty photography; in general it makes me queasy when there is a horizon in the photo that is not horizontal. I immediately knew I wanted to correct the tilt. The easiest way to do this in PS is to grab the ruler tool and drag-n-drop what should be horizontal or vertical. Then select Image>Rotate Canvas>Arbitrary to get PS to rotate the image to the nearest 90ºs. Then I cropped and clone-stamped to recreate the vegetation that was now “missing” to make the picture complete. After a fair bit of clean-up, I took out the bruises on the girl’s legs. Some lightening with the curves midtones and masked just for the skin fixed the underexposed girl while leaving the background as is left me with a great starting point to play with actions and colors.
I did use actions on this week’s photo. Sometimes they’re a great time saver (like this week, for sure) though I argue that it is very important to know what’s behind the actions before you go using them blindly. Knowing your software inside and out is an important foundation to being able to tweaking any action to perfection. Actions used include Totally Rad Actions – Warm it up Kris, Boutwell Magic Glasses, Get Faded (summer), and Grandma’s Tap Shoes all at various levels of opacity and some with layer masking. I also had some selective color adjustment layers thrown in to the mix to correct for some very red shadows on the face and right arm which seemed to be caused by a reflection off something red that is just out of frame and a composite layer set to soft light at a lower opacity to give the photo some “pop.” A quick resize/sharpen and I was done.
And just for fun, my black and white conversion below:
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It’s funny that you can’t stand the tilt – it doesn’t ever bother me – to the point that I don’t really notice it, but then my mom calls me up and says “Straighten that picture, it’s driving me crazy!” :)
That said, I really love your black and white. Great range of tones!
WOW!
you did a really really Good Job!
I totally agree with you on the “tilting”! I felt like she was just going to topple over! Very nice edits by the way! :)
I really like your edits!
After seeing the photo after being cropped like this, I like it a lot! I didn’t even think about it haha. I love both of the edits a lot. Very pretty!!
I dont like the tilt either! That was the first thing I wanted to correct. Your edits look great. I think they are my favorite of the ones I have looked at so far.
Love your bw conversion.
Jen, I really love these “Fix-it Friday” posts. Thanks so much for the little snippets of practical PS knowledge.
thank you! I never did end up happy with this one until I went back and started adding textures to it. Maybe I’ll make an additional post with the texture… if I can finish proofing my senior session with time to play left over!
My oldest is off to kindergarten as I type this. What a journey it’s been already.
I wanted to homeschool. I still want to homeschool. From the day he was born, I’ve wanted to homeschool. I always said I would homeschool, so why aren’t we homeschooling? In short, because my husband strongly feels that the best place for him is in a public school setting. We keep to ourselves and don’t have many (if any) close friends. (Now all my friends are going to get up-in-arms, but it’s true. Our closest friends moved to Seattle 4 years ago and no one has come even close to being in our daily lives so spontaneously and continuously as they were while they lived here.) This little man, he is a friendly happy dude. He loves having friends. He needs friends. He thrives on friendships. Homeschooling with me wouldn’t give him that at this stage in the game, and so, even though he has nearly learned everything they’ll need to know by the end of the year, he is going to kindergarten. Maybe I will be able to pull him out of school later, maybe not. For now, I know it was the right decision for him, and I’m so proud of him going off to school with his daddy.
It’s kind of humbling to post a picture of me here – no make-up, no shoes, barely woken up but I think it’s important for the little man to have a picture with his mommy. Yes, mommy. He tried to call me just “mom” but always slips back to mommy, and I love it. Hopefully I can remember to take a photo with him, and eventually with each of his brothers, all on their first day of school each year, in front of our house
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I’m loving shooting senior portraits! His mom came up with the perfect location close to their home and I jumped at the chance to photograph there: a beautiful, beautiful golf course!
We rode a golf cart all over the front nine (and a few more holes) without seeing a single golfer out and about last night. He braved ant bites and sweltering heat and still came away smiling, even after pulling an all-nighter with the band. What a trooper!
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The photos look great! The sky picture is amazing. It really was the perfect sky that evening. Looking forward to seeing the rest of the photos. Thanks for a great session.
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