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:
