I am starting a new project that a lot of people have decided to try called, Project 365. It’s where you take a photo of yourself everyday of the year. I am putting a twist on it because I have no desire to set up a tripod and timer and take shots of myself sooo….. I am going to take photos of my family (and I might occasionally pop in some of them.) Not that I don’t have a lot going on already, but I am starting to realize that I neglect to shoot pictures of my own family and myself which has been weighing on me for a while now. It’s a project that a lot of people post on this site: www.flickr.com
I am going to be posting on my blog as well so I can show my photoshop steps too and maybe it will help somebody improve their photo editing skills as well. Here’s day one… take care all!
This is the SOOC (Straight Out Of Camera) Shot:
Pretty cute right? This is D. my daughter. 6 years old going on 12.
Some of things I want out of this picture I could’ve set in camera, but I don’t want to have to adjust settings everytime I take a different type of photo. For example the contrast in this photo is not quite where I want it to be, but for for other photos it might be just right…
I think the first thing I want to do is a simple color pop to increase the contrast and saturation. To do that I just duplicate the background later twice, select the top layer and change the blending mode from the drop-down menu on the layers palette to Soft Light. Then I adjust the layer opacity till I think it’s about right. And this is what I get…
Simple, and necessary. Next I’m going to do an eye pop. I have to merge the popped layer and the layer below it to do this step. To do this I control click on the top later (right click on a PC) and select merge down. I duplicate the merged layer. Next I go up to the filter layer and click it, hover over the sharpen tab, and select unsharp mask from the dropdown. I moved the view in the dialog box so that it’s over the eye since that’s what I’m sharpening. My usual settings are 125%, radius 1.5, and threshold 4. After I select okay I have to make a mask so I select the mask button at the bottom of the layers palette (the one that looks like a box with a circle in it.) I only want to expose the eyes and a mask will help me do this. I push CMND+I on my keyboard to flip the mask, and with a white brush w/hardness around 80 I paint over the eyes to expose the sharpness under the mask. If I make a mistake I can change the color of the brush and paint w/black over the mistake to hide it again. Once I’ve done that I merge down a layer again and duplicate again.
Sharp right? Now it’s time to really make those eyes pop!
I’m going to select the adjustment layer button at the bottom of the layers palette (the one that looks like a ying yang) and click curves. In the RGB channel I click above the line towards the middle to make the mid-tones lighter. When I think it’s about the right tone I click okay. I’ve got to flip the mask over again since I only want to adjust the eyes. Then I paint over them with a white brush w/hardness at 0%.
I’m going to do the same thing w/her teeth… here’s what it looks like when I’m done:
Next some skin smoothing is in order… I am not great at that so I decided to get some help from an amazing photo retoucher called, Photoshop Mama. Her skin smoothing actions are second to none and give me perfect results everytime. You can find her site and links to where you can purchase her actions here After I apply that action I get this…
All of these adjustments have been pretty subtle so far because I don’t want to take away from the detail of the original picture which is very important. I’m going to lighten her eyes now. The way I do it may sound complicated, but it is actually really easy once you get the hang of it. I select the curves adjustment layer and click somewhere in the middle on the line to make a point. Then I make another point down the line from that point to lighten the shadows. I bring that second point up above the line until I like the lightness in her eyes. It should look like this…
I flipped the layer (CMND+I) and painted in the area I wanted lightened. When doing this you have to pay attention to which direction the light is going so you don’t have unnatural eye lights going on. And now we have this…
The next thing I want to do is add some highlights to her hair for a little more color. To do that first I have to duplicate the last layer then I’m going to select the dodge and burn tool, change the mode to highlights at about 15%. After that I am going to go over the highlights on her hair with that tool and adjust the opacity of the layer till I like it. Which leaves me with this…
After I’ve done that I have to add some color to the highlights. Using a curves adjustment layer I increase the reds and yellows with a touch of magenta by making points in each color level from the dropdown menu in the curves dialog box. Then I’ve got to do that whole flip the mask thing (CMND+I) and paint in the highlight areas. That gave me this:
The final thing that I am going to do to this image is a final curves adjustment layer to tone the image how I’d like it.
The before and after image is this…..
Okay… I know this was a long post, but I wanted to be as detailed as possible and it honestly takes me just a few minutes since I’ve been doing it for a while now… I hope you enjoyed it and didn’t fall asleep lol! 
