iheartfaces Fix It Friday - Pinball

Pinball can be a mesmerizing game to watch. The lights and the sounds are probably too much for a child to pass up. Such is the case with this week's Fix It Friday by Amy Pinney.

I will try and go through the steps I took but sometimes I make so many changes that I forget what I did.

Original:

My edit:

1. Used levels and curves to adjust exposure.
2. Cropped.
3. Cloned to take the blue shirt out of the corner.
4. Used the Florabella Cappuccino texture.
5. Cropped a bit more.
6. Used the magnetic lasso at 5feather to select her face.
7. Ran Gaussian blur so that I could get the color but not the actual texture on her face.
8. Dodged the eyes a bit to make them stand out more.
9. The green in the background was distracting me so I lassoed that and desaturated.
10. Touched up the face to make the green completely gone.

Fix It Friday - Snowman

This week at iheartfaces we have a photo of Angie's daughter with a little snowman. The background is the perfect backdrop for using texture!

Here is the original:

I changed the levels and curves, fiddled with saturation and then

added a ghost bokeh from Shadowhouse Creations.

iheartfaces Challenge - Texture

I love texture! Seriously. Hardly a day goes by that I'm not fiddling with texture on some photo involving my kids. However, I decided to go back to May 2007 for this week's iheartfaces challenge. It is of my daughter the day she came home from the hospital. The sheets on the hospital bed made for the perfect backdrop to play with texture. It was so fun playing with a picture I haven't seen in a while. Although we aren't having anymore children I have to admit that this picture made my heart swoon for another.

Fix It Friday

This week's I Heart Faces Fix-It Friday is a little different. No cute kid faces this week, nope, today we have a rough and tumble cowboy! This photo is so cool. I wanted to make it look a little rustic. A little old. A little vintage. So here is my take on this awesome picture!

The original:

My take invovled a crop, then some curve and level adjustments followed by Pioneer Woman's Heartland action with some adjustments to those layers. Finally I topped it off with a texture from Florabella textures:

I ♥ Faces Fix-It Friday

It's Friday! I love Fix-It Fridays. This week we have one sweet looking little man. His big eyes are just adorable! I'm still obsessed with textures so I decided to use it for this photo. The clean background was fun to play around with.

Here is the original:

Here is my "fix":

Texture Tutorial Thursday

Ok, the title is a little lame but it's all I could come up with. Feel free to offer some other alternative! I am seriously loving textures. They give you a freedom with your photos like you wouldn't believe. Just changing the layer style gives you a brand new picture, add to that a higher or lower opacity and you have a work of art! This is the photo I am going to work with today:

At this point you may want to go sign up (free) at CG Textures. I used their "PlasterWhiteDirty0054" texture for this tutorial. They have awesome textures, as many as you can think of!

Step 1. Open your photo in Photoshop.

Step 2. Now open your texture. Using the move tool, drag your texture onto your photo. If it does not cover the whole photo, drag the transform controls so that it does. You can do this quickly by dragging diagonally.

Step 3. In your layers panel, choose a style from the drop-down menu on the left. I usually start with overlay. Now my photo looks like this:

Step 4. Change the opacity of the texture layer. I like this texture but it was still a little too harsh for me. I dropped the opacity to 75% so the photo now looks like this:

Step 5. I wanted the prominent, open flowers in the front to have a little more pop. So, on the texture layer I added a layer mask. That is the square with the cirlcle in it at the bottom of the layers panel. Now, making sure that your foreground color is black, paint the open flowers. This takes away the texture on the flowers. You can change the opacity of your brush if you want to leave a little of the texture on the flowers. For this photo I left it at 100%. You'll notice I did the mask on the right side of this flower. This was for demonstration purposes so you could see what the mask does.

Here is the final product.

Did I miss something important? Do you have any questions? Please feel free to ask. I have never done a tutorial before but I know that some people really enjoy seeing textures and have wondered how to use them.

My Photo Included in Pioneer Woman Assignments!

Over at the Pioneer Woman photography page they hold assignments every once in a while. The most recent was an assignment to use textures. Since having bought the Florabella textures (Thank You!!) a few weeks ago I have been going crazy texturizing all sorts of photos. I submitted several photos to the assignment and low and behold one of them was featured on her site today! It is the sixth one down of a wild horse we saw while on vacation in February. I'm so excited to be featured on her site, I can't even tell you! Here is the photo that is featured:

Here is the original photo, it's amazing what a few tweaks in Photoshop and some textures can do to a photo!