Enhancements

Posted by CallyAnn Hamilton on Feb 10, 2013 in Blog, Photography | 2 comments

Portrait Touch-Up

Bethani’s smile is absolutely adorable in this shot, but her mother was mortified that I caught her on camera with a dirty face.  She’s been sick lately so her eyes are watery and her poor little face is crusty. :( Still, I think her smile is priceless so the shot is worth saving.

To clean her up I went to town with the lasso tool, content aware fill, and the clone stamp.  I had to zoom in really close and make small selections to maximize the power of content aware fill, and the spots that I couldn’t fix automatically I cloned over with the stamp.  I focus mostly on cleaning up right around her mouth, but I also tidied her onesie and removed the tears from her eyes.  To finish I took the image into Camera Raw and lowered the clarity to smooth out her skin. I also bumped up the highlights just a touch.  I decided against completely cleaning up her face because I didn’t want to strip away the reality of this moment in her life.

 

Replace Color

The bold color of Daymon’s shirt makes this a great photo to experiment on with the replace color feature in Photoshop.

 

To pull this off, I simply went to Image > Adjustments > Replace Color. With the eye dropper I selected the yellow on Daymon’s shirt, and then adjusted the scrubbers for hue and saturation in the Replace Color panel to get this vibrant shade of red-orange.  I also touched up a few spots on the image with the lasso tool and content-aware fill.

 

Match Color

Cory was caught in the act swiping some Chex cereal. She’s trying to hide the evidence in her tummy, but there’s still a bit on her face…

Although I liked the colors and tones in the original, I wanted to try experimenting with Photoshop’s Match Color feature. I opened this image alongside Angel Light (below) and went to Image > Adjustments > Match Color and chose Angel Light as the source.  I then lowered the luminance and increased the fade so that the change wouldn’t be quite so stark.