I Heart Faces: Fix-It Friday #72

You know, if there is a kid in the picture, count me in to play along!  So yes, I missed last week because the "kid" was too old (hee hee).

This week's image is near and dear to my heart since we are a military family and "Daddy" is gone more than we want.  I love this capture because it reminds me how amazingly strong a father-daughter bond can be despite the frequent separations.  There is nothing like hearing our daughter (she is now 6) cry excitedly "DADDYYYY!!!!!" as she runs into my husband's arms after a deployment.

For my edit, I first wanted to lighten just the father's face to bring the exposure of his face closer to that of the baby girl's.  In Photoshop CS4, here are the steps I took to selectively lighten:

1. Select the lasso tool from the toolbar.
2. Change the Feather to around 30 px.  This will make the edge of anything you selectively edit much softer, instead of a hard edge line.  Make sure "Anti-alias" is checked.
3. Loosely select the area you want to lighten.  Don't worry - just lasso away, because your feather setting is so high, there is a lot of room to fudge.  If you don't like what you selected, just click anywhere on the canvas to deselect and try again.
4. Go to Curves (Ctrl-M on a PC) and adjust to taste.  What I do is pick a point around the middle or upper middle area of the curve and pull it up slightly to lighten the selected area of the picture.  Hit OK when done.
5. Ctrl-D or just click anywhere on the canvas to deselect.  Ta-dah!

Then, I ran Pioneer Woman's Heartland action, and adjusted the opacity of several of the layers to my taste.  Download her awesome actions for free if you haven't already!  And...that's it!  :)

For a digital layout, I wanted to do something other than 12x12.  My scrapbook albums are currently the American Crafts D-ring binder.  I love being able to mix and match page sizes within an album, instead of being stuck with one size (boring!).  This layout was sized at 11x8.5, which is just a standard letter page turned into a landscape orientation.  It offers a whole new perspective and canvas to work on, doesn't it? 

The digital kit is a Feature Friday Freebie today at Little Dreamer Designs - grab it while you can today!

Thanks for checking out my blog.  Happy Friday, everyone!

I Heart Faces: Fix-It Friday #70

I know, I know, it is SUNDAY and I'm just getting around to posting this week's Fix-it Friday edits.  Well you must know I have a soft spot for girl pictures, so how could I NOT play with this photo?

This is the original:

This color version is pretty much my usual photoshop edit.  I love the summery colors in the picture.

But I thought, let's do something different!  So here is my b&w, which in this case means "brown & white" (he he).  The action is used was Indie Classic BnW by Indie Actions, which I purchased a couple years ago and still love to use today.  They are one of the (very) few action sets I keep at hand for editing.

For a digital scrapbook layout, I was very excited to play with more of a Fall palette with the B&W.  The brown tones are gorgeous when set off with purples and greens, don'cha think?

This amazing kit is a collaboration by ten very talented designers at Design House Digital.  To get this kit, you need to visit each of the designers' blogs to collect everything in this awesome kit.  While it does take a little bit of time and effort, blog-hopping can hardly be considered "work" when there is so much eye candy along the way! To get started on the blog hop, just follow this link.  Tip: open each blog in a different window so you don't have to keep navigating back.