It’s Friday and that means it is time for Fix-it-Friday at I ♥ Faces. Each week they post a photo that was taken by someone who follows the blog at I ♥ Faces. Then a few contributors edit the photo and then they ask anyone else who would like to play along to edit the photo too. It is great practice and a fun way to learn new editing tricks.

Here is the original photo:

Once again, I started by brightening this image because I thought it was underexposed. I used a curves layer and pulled up on the midtones until I thought it looked good. After that I did my CMYK color correction. I added red and took out a little blue. After that I just worked on fixing the skin imperfections. I used the patch tool. Then I worked on the red spots on his cheeks. I used a hue saturation layer and decreased the saturation of the reds. Then I created a mask and inverted it and just painted it on the red spots using a soft brush. Then I used Magic Powder from MCP Actions. After that I just sharpened and resized for the web.

Here is what I came up with:

I also decided to play around and do a black and white conversion on this one.

Be sure to check out I ♥ Faces to see all the amazing photos that were entered in this week’s contest.

It’s Friday and that means it is time for Fix-it-Friday at I ♥ Faces. Each week they post a photo that was taken by someone who follows the blog at I ♥ Faces. Then a few contributors edit the photo and then they ask anyone else who would like to play along to edit the photo too. It is great practice and a fun way to learn new editing tricks.

Here is the original photo:

This photo needed to be lightened up and color corrected. I did both of those using my usual curves method. Then I decided to clone out some of the signs. I used the clone stamp tool for this. Last I decided to put a texture on this photo.

Here is my edit:

Be sure to check out I ♥ Faces to see all the amazing photos that were entered in this week’s contest.

It’s Friday and that means it is time for Fix-it-Friday at I ♥ Faces. Each week they post a photo that was taken by someone who follows the blog at I ♥ Faces. Then a few contributors edit the photo and then they ask anyone else who would like to play along to edit the photo too. It is great practice and a fun way to learn new editing tricks.

Here is the original photo:

The main problem with this photo was the white balance. I really struggled with this one to get it right. I used my normal curves method to increase the blue and the red and decrease the green until the numbers looked right. Then I worked on editing out the snowflake on her cheek. To do that I used the brush tool. I sampled a good skin color next to it. I decreased the opacity of the brush to 12% and then brushed in the color over the snowflake. Next I just sharpened the eyes a little bit using MCP Actions Eye Doctor and Dentist tool. I didn’t do any skin smoothing to this photo. I’m not sure, but this one looked like it had already been smoothed a bit. Finally, I cropped the image.

Here is my edit:

Be sure to check out I ♥ Faces to see all the amazing photos that were entered in this week’s contest.

It’s Friday and that means it is time for Fix-it-Friday at I ♥ Faces. Each week they post a photo that was taken by someone who follows the blog at I ♥ Faces. Then a few contributors edit the photo and then they ask anyone else who would like to play along to edit the photo too. It is great practice and a fun way to learn new editing tricks.

Here is the original photo:

I had a lot of fun with this photo. I loved the composition and the girl is beautiful. This photo was dramatically underexposed and needed some work on the skin. I started out using a curves layer to brighten the whole photo. I brightened it as much as I could, and then added a second curves layer to brighten it even more. After that I ran Noiseware to combat some of the noise that was caused by the underexposure. Then I went to work on the skin. I used the spot healing brush and the patch tool to fix some blemishes on her face. Next I used another curves layer to fix the white balance focusing on the skin tones on the face. Then I ran Magic Powder from MCP Actions and lowered the opacity to about 35%. Magic Skin from MCP Actions is one of my favorite action sets! I use Magic Powder on almost all of my portraits. After that, I was happy with how the girl looked. But I still felt like the background needed something. I decided to add a light texture from NicoleV textures.

Here is my final product:

Be sure to check out I ♥ Faces to see all the amazing photos that were entered in this week’s contest.