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.
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