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.

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.

Okay, I’ve gotten oh, about 4 hours of sleep. One how-to:  See that orange construction barrier up on the original?  Yeah, over on the left about halfway down.  You can’t miss it.  I got *most* of it (okay, I missed a wee bit) adjusted.  I selected a small portion of the orangey part with the lasso tool (I keep it on about 3-4 pixels feathering when I’m doing my rough selections) and pulled up the Selective Color adjustment layer menu and played with the sliders until the orange turned green and matched the background.  I don’t know the exact settings, but I selected “reds” and dropped the magenta and yellow and boosted cyan then played with blacks until I was happy with it and hit Return (or enter on a PC).  Selecting a small portion with the lasso tool before you add an adjustment layer creates the adjustment layer with a layer mask applied. Just brush over the orange parts with a white brush (and the layer mask selected) and turn them green!

I used the same procedure on the dead shurbbery to the left of the man to turn it ever-so-slightly less grey, but not enough that anyone’d notice.

Be sure to sneak a peek at the Senior session photo I posted earlier tonight.

photo © 2010 Savor Photography, used with permission

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:

Photo © 2010 Dana Suggs, edited with permission via http://www.iheartfaces.com/ Fix-it Friday #68

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

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!

This was a fun one. My second Fix-it Friday. I have to admit, I was doing a little bit of photostream stalking waiting for this weeks’ photo to go up.  I’ve read quite a few other edits of this that say there’s nothing wrong with the original, but I beg to differ.  The highlights are blown out in several places which draw your eye anywhere BUT the girl.  What your eye needs to go to first and foremost is the girl, then her surroundings, not the other way around.  My edit is an attempt to get your eye first to the girl, then to her surroundings without cropping it all out; context is important.  A successful edit, in my opinion, is one that helps draw your eye first to the subject of the photo then allows your eye to explore the rest of what’s there.

This edit was action-free and I’ve already closed the file in PS, so I might have a few of the steps off. First thing upon opening was a new [empty] layer and the clone-stamp tool set to a soft, smallish, brush and “sample all layers” to clone out the distractions. Then I shift-option(or alt on a PC)-command-E ‘d it all into a new layer and went back over the obvious repeat patterns with the patch tool. The third layer up becomes my working background though I still have the original. (Does that make sense? It’s a trick I learned along the way. It takes everything visible and merges them in a new layer!  You can’t find this in the menus so it’s not very well-known.)

Once I had the cleaned up SOOC image (the girl didn’t need any retouching – the lens flare (later on) made her eyes pop without any additional work), I did a curves adjustment layer (I changed the keyboard shortcut to that, so I can’t tell you what it’s supposed to be) and bumped up the red midtones and down the blue – it’s basically the same thing as PW’s Warmer action, but doing it yourself gives you more control without the extra step of having to mess with the action. I left the RGB alone since you really can’t get away with lightening the midtones without completely obliterating her white top. On that curves layer, I added a layer mask at, eh, 50% grey and to tone down the grass and masked her out so it was 100% on the girl.

Dealing with the overblown skies and background… well, I cheated there. I added a solid color adjustment layer with a yellowey-green set to darken at a lower opacity, somewhere in the 20′s with everything masked out but the background. Oh yeah! I remember now, I did the same thing to the grass and greened up the white-yellow blades of grass. Same procedure, different mask, opacity slider adjusted until it looked right to me.  Too much and the grass looks spray-painted and fake.  It should be just enough that no one ever knows you did anything to the grass in the first place.

Another shift-option-command-E to add the flare (Filter>Render>Lens Flare…) then crop, a little web sharpen and voila! And just because I loved everyone’s BW conversions last week, I’ve included one of mine below.

Photo © 2010 Dana Suggs, edited with permission via http://www.iheartfaces.com/ Fix-it Friday #67

I sent my boys (all four of them) up to Dallas for the 4th of July weekend to visit the in-laws while I stayed home with the three corgis that we were doggie-sitting.  It was an excellent time to get a lot of work done (like repainting the front room so I could utilize it as an office) and enjoy a quiet house.  It turns out that my brother, who is the second shooter for an amazing wedding photographer in Waco, had the weekend free so he drove down for a visit.  With the kids gone and tons of camera equipment and super nice glass lying around, we decided to pick a few of the best-suited lenses and head downtown to catch the fireworks at Auditorium Shores.  I had a great time.  We met a nice couple from Houston who sat down next to us with their camera equipment and tripod (and three adorable children) and sat back and click click clicked away.

I put together a little sampling below.  I hope you enjoy!

This is the first time I took a camera to a wedding that I wasn’t attending as a guest.  It was 2009.  I was a co-shooter, but not one with a gun.  I used to think I didn’t do a good enough job to be blog-worthy despite having permission to post these, but I went back through them recently and there are quite a few really nice moments I captured that I would love to share with you a few at a time.

The original photo is top and my edit is the next.  I tend to only edit once, so I don’t have, like, thirteen variations to throw at you.  But to make up for only having one edit, I’ll give y’all more details about what went into this edit.

• duplicate layer to clean up background
• crop
• curves adjustment layer to brighten midtones
• secret ingredient skin retouching to smooth his cheeks (I’m not giving away ALL my secrets!)
• TRA Warm it up Kris @ 65%
• levels adjustment layer (blue channel adjustments)
• TRA Big Blue @ 50% for irises only
• TRA Oh Snap! for shirt only with 0% for saturation
• my own virtual toothbrush to brighten up that smile ever so slightly
• TRA Dirty & Used Up @ 9%
• Web resize & sharpen

So there you have it.  This one was fun.  Hope you enjoyed!  Feel free to tell me what you think in the comments.

Photo © 2010 Angie Arthur Photography, edited with permission via http://www.iheartfaces.com/ Fix-it Friday #66

Wait.  Did I just reveal a little nerdiness?  Yeah.  I guess I did.  Forgive me?

Maybe if I go back through the sessions and post them, y’all will forget I said things like… DNS addresses and propagate… For full disclosure, I’ll file all these fall ’09 sessions in the category “revisited” just so there’s no confusion that, well, they’re o-l-d.  They’ve all been re-edited as my editing style has changed (for the better!) and some may feature images that I once passed over, but they were all photographed in 2009.

I hope that they inspire you to start thinking about YOUR fall 2010 photos, and you know, call me to take them.  No, really.  I mean it!  I’d rather you call me now (512-553-5653) while my schedule is still wide open than to wait until the second week in November when I won’t be able to help you until, gasp!, next year.

Here we are, the first session.  The V Family.  Enjoy!