Sometimes when I make the blueprints, I tend to go overboard and almost exaggerate the edits so you can see what I did. For this one I wanted to do a super realistic, natural edit. Thank you to Jill Ellison for this adorable picture.
This little girl looks so cute with her sweet curls. Here is what I did to give her a little glow, slightly better coloring and a sparkle to her eyes using a few Photoshop actions and a few manual adjustment layers.
Step 1 – Ran MCP Color Burst from the Complete Workflow.
Step 2 – Did a manual Hue/Saturation Layer – selected Blue channel – and then Cyan channel, Took opacity of each down to about –65% to reduce colors in the whites of her eyes. Inverted mask. Painted back on the mask with a white brush on the eyes to get rid of the cast.
Step 3 – Ran MCP Magic Powder from the Magic Skin action set – set opacity to 36% (just wanted a light smoothing).
Step 4 – her skin had a touch too much blue and magenta – so I ran Magic Skin’s Skin Cast Blast – activated the Bye Bye Blueberry layer at 100%. Masked back the shadow area with a 30% brush as the shadows did not need that much of a correction.
Step 5 – Ran MCP Crackle from the Quickie Collection action set.
Step 6 – at this point I noticed that the shadow areas were getting lost on her shirt and hair. So I did a levels layer and adjusted the output slider to 25. This was a tad too much so I lowered the opacity of that layer to 85%.
Step 7 – cropped.
If I had more time, I may have extracted the tree and replaced it with the background. I would have preferred that over the tree behind her. But at least the drop got rid of the hand and arm coming at her head.
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