Julie takes great photos, so there wasn’t much to be done with this edit. My goal was to make the subjects pop from the background.
1. Even though I have the full RAW editor in Photoshop Elements since it’s included with the Mac version, I have decided to only use functions in RAW that can be accessed from any Elements program. I made some slight adjustments in the RAW editor:
2. There was a small bit of red along the baby’s hairline so I used the healing brush to clear that up.
3. I used Noiseware lightly on the photo.
4. Next, I selected the background with the magic wand, copied and pasted it into a new layer, changed it to a motion blur (angle -8, distance 475) and then used a layer’s mask to remove any blur from the subjects.
5. Julie’s baby’s hands were rather red, so I used a hue adjustment layer, chose red, sampled from the thumb, and made my adjustments. I then duplicated the hue adjustment layer, reduced red from the dad’s face, and reduced the opacity of that layer. (His didn’t need as much as the hands.) My layers looked like this:
6. As usual, I adjusted the levels.
7. I ran Pioneer Woman’s Lovely and Ethereal action and reduced the opacity to 12%.
8. My typical unsharp mask settings were used:
50-1.4-0
5-250-0
9. Dad’s face was still a bit soft, so I selected around it and used unsharp mask settings 80-3.2-0.
10. Finally, I used a gradient map called “foreground to background”, changed the blending mode to “soft light”, and reduced the opacity to 34%. The photo was finished off by cropping to 5×7. Now that I’m looking at the final, if I had the time, one more adjustment I would make is to dodge the hair along the back of the baby’s head so that it doesn’t blend in with the black stripe behind her as much.
This photo seemed perfect for a black and white. I used a black and white gradient map and then used a hue adjustment layer (check colorize) and added a touch of brown tint.
Beautiful work…and thanks for walking us through your steps.
Gorgeous! love the first edit! smart to get rid of those lights!
Wonderful Tutorial, Beautiful Work!
Excellent job!