Wow! It’s been a while since I’ve participated in a Fix-it Friday! I decided that I need a little ‘me time’ before I hit my pharmacology books hard this weekend! Hopefully I can start to do these more often since I really enjoy being able to edit other peoples pictures!!

Here is the before. Great potential, just a bit blue, and a bit dark

And here’s my fix -

I had originally thought that I’d get rid of the slight sunflare at the top of the head. But after playing with it for a while, I decided to just Vamp up that Flare! I love getting that flare in my images, but it was fun to be able to fake it too!
Steps:
1. Curves adjustment to brighten up the image
2. Ran Skin Cast Blast by MCP to get rid of the blue cast
3. Child’s Play Warm Up because I like sunflare images to be nice and cozy
4. Slight dodge and sharpen on the eyes, as well as lighten on the left eye.
5. Filter-Render-Lensflare on a separate layer. I believe I did the 30mm at 110%
6. Ran my sponge tool around the flare at about 15%
7. Sharpened for web

Alright, so I’m a day late on this, but I love playing so better-late-than-never here!!!

1.  Ran a Defog - USM @ 20, 60, 0
2.  S curve using curves layer
3.   Skin Casts Blast by MCP. Used bye bye shrek & blueberry. Both at 100%
4.   Dodge around eyes @ 50%. USM
5.  Warm up by Child’s Play
6.  Cindy’s Periwinkle Haze
7.  Burned midtones @ 80%
8.  Crop

See more great “fixes” by clicking here!

This weeks fix was fun to play with, especially since the little girl was adorable!!! Here’s the original image….

The steps I took in cs3…..

1. exposure fixer-upper (Childs Play) at 74%
2. skin cast blasts (MCP Actions) blueberry @ 41%,  shrek @ 37%, mellow yellow @ 100%
3.  Phaunt’s eye pop & sharpen @ 60%
4.  MCP powder your nose to mask some of the noise in the shadows of her face
5.  Slight burn around the edges
6.  Resize/Sharpen for web

 
 
This picture was too adorable not to play around with some more. For my black and white, I used the medium black and white from Simple by Sarah Actions. For the third image, I used a freebie action I picked up somewhere - Cindy’s Periwinkle. When I use that one, I do a slight burn around the entire picture to bring back the shadows and give the face depth.

This one was a little more difficult for me - I would have preferred to have stared with the RAW file as under-exposed images are easier to correct in ACR. But I have what I have, so this is what I did! (I used some random actions I’ve acquired over the years, so I’m not exactly sure of some creators)

1. Crop and stretch canvas using tutorial by MCP Actions
2. Lighten Darks Atn - Presto
3. Sunshine in your hands atn by Phaunt
4. Exposure Fixerupper by Childsplay
5. Eye pop & sharpen by Phaunt
6. Subtle color atn x2 by Indie Actions
7. Fixed hots spot on the cheek by using the patch tool
8. Magic Skin by MCP Actions @ 64%
9. JPG deblocking by alienware - 100%
10. Slight burn around edges
11. resize & sharpen for web

Want to see some more great fixes? Click the button below!

Wow, I feel rusty already.  I finally have my computer set up in our hotel room and I was anxious to download this week’s Fix-it Friday picture and get to work! I surprised that I even remember how to open photoshop. Okay, so maybe I’ve being a tad melodramatic, but it has been a long, stressful week and a half!!  Lets see, from the 7th, we’ve had our home flooded, been packed up, moved out, floors torn out, argued with insurance - repeatedly, had sick kids, missed Easter Sunday, cracked a tooth, moved to 3 hotels, visited the dentist, told that I needed a root canal - asap, now have 2 sick kiddos, argued with insurance again, now I’m sick, had to reschedule root canal because I’m sick, and I think that’s about it. I am wiped! And I still have hours and hours and hours of editing ahead of me! But first, I have to do the fix-it Friday post! It’s always fun to work on someone else’s picture!! So here it is!

I did very little to this image. To be honest, I still don’t feel well and computer time isn’t much fun when you’re constantly sneezing and blowing your nose!!

1. Crop
2. USM on eyes - 100, 3, 0
3. Color me in by Childs Play
4. Vignette by Childs Play
5. Sharpen for web.

Yup, that’s it. Took me maybe 4 minutes?? Easy peasy with Childs Play - by far some of my favorite actions!

1.   Ran a basic defog over the entire image
2.   Exposure fixer-upper by Childs Play
3.   Used curves to help with the blue tint - took it out
4.   Brighten up Buttercup x2 - Childs Play
5.   Warm up by Childs Play
6.   Cropped and used edit->free transform to adjust the angle & bring in the diagonal line
7.   Cloned out the drain hole
8.   Had to rebuild part of the image using the patch tool. Since this wall was "busy" that was easy to hide!
9.   Sharpened the eyes using the magnetic lasso tool. Settings at 100, 3, 0.
10. Joki deep color pop action
11.  Erased skin back in
12.  Glowy color  by Childs Play . Brought the opacity down just a bit.
13.  Various textures & overlays until I liked it
14.  Burned
15.  Added seniors rock using Street Soul font
16.  Chisseled text & adjust perspective
17.  Saved for web

So, on my new favorite blog, I heart faces, they have a Fix it Friday. They post a picture and hundreds of people ‘fix’ it. I love tinkering around in photoshop, so I think I’ll starting giving this a try. Seems like a fun way to make sure I blog on Fridays. Along with posting the before & after pictures, I will also share the steps I took to achieve the final look!

Enjoy!
Sarah

Before

After

Normally, I’d work on a picture the ‘long’ way… by hand and not by actions. I was in a hurry today, so I did each of these using actions alone. Now, that being said, I do not believe that photoshoppers should rely on actions. Once you learn how to
to properly work on images, actions can be a great tool for cutting down your work time. But before that, you really need to understand what you are doing and why you are doing it!

Now, for the steps that I took to get this image:

1. Crop to 5×7, just because that’s what I prefer to work with
Used Child’s Play Actions for 1-4
1. Exposure fixer-upper
2. Brighten up buttercup x2
3. Warm me up x2
4. Glowly Color

4. Circled eyes using magnetic lasso and ran a USM set to 100, 3.0, 0
5. Brought down opacity just a bit - to around 86%
6. Ran eye pop action and adjusted to 86% opacity as well (I don’t like eyes to look freaky!)

7. Vignette by Child’s Play
8. Resized for web using Heidi’s resize action.

I timed it, I did this image is just over 4 minutes, and that was with a squirmy toddler in my lap!!

Variations on After
For each of these, I began with my ‘after’ image from above

Used Jess’ Warm Honey Action

Indie Actions Subtle Color & 1/2 kick

Purplish b&w from Child’s Play