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.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 24th, 2009 at 9:00 am and is filed under Blueprints, Photoshop Actions, Photoshop Tips & Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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