doudsville

i think i've moved through the "feeling great in the 2nd trimester" phase and into the "i'm having trouble standing up without holding my breath 3rd trimester" phase. okay, maybe it's not that bad....yet, but i do find that i've become terribly lazy over the past few weeks. even picking up the camera has become a bit of a chore.

anyways. i sometimes enjoy looking at picture-taking people's before and after edits, so i thought i'd throw one of mine down here. i'm a believer that a HUGE part of what makes for interesting photographs lies in the post processing, and i find no shame in that. it's just art, right? i'm no purist. and that's not to say that i'm good at the editing either. i know what i've been taught and don't really stray too far from what feels safe to me. i thought it'd be interesting to post the edits on this particular photo, because i did a LOT of stuff to it in cs5. like, a whole lot. this photo needed lot's of help, and my layers palette was stacked DEEP!

straight out of camera:

processed:

not a fantastically composed shot, but i'm a fan of it for my own reasons, so here's what i did.

1. defog, aka initial sharpening
2. took most of the color casting out with a curves layer
3. basic color boost (also with a curves and a levels layer) since i'm shooting RAW.
4. brightened eyes
5. removed some of that blue color cast from little lady's hair. (i swear my child is right out of that mini-series "children of the corn." her hair absorbs all sorts of crazy colored light. boo!)
6. resized and gave it another sharpening for web-posting.

and then, after i looked at the processed photo again, i was like...her hair is STILL blue.

dammit!

so i reopened my full-sized edit, masked out everything but her hair, then color balanced just the hair again adding lots of red and yellow. then i did the same thing with that blue splotch smack-dab in the middle of her forehead. see it? it's still sort of there...

THEN!

i saw how dark and yucky those circles under her eyes are looking. they get enhanced when i do the color-boost curves layer. i should probably mask them BEFORE i run that layer, but alas, i didn't. so i used the "spot-healing" tool to doctor them up a bit. notice i didn't remove the dark circles completely. that would make her look too doctored in my opinion. i just lightened them a bit so they weren't distracting.

i'm sure i'll come back and look at this whole thing again later and see five other things i screwed up, but for now....here's the final edit: