I just can't wait to meet her

[Mercy299]

This is my son and daughter in law. They are expecting a daughter in Sept or Oct. My first grand daughter. What can I do to improve this photo in ps. Please include
instructions as I am not too good with photo shop. I thought sepia might work, but I do not know how to do that.

[Sailfish]

Both done fairly quick. Don't have time atm to write down what I did. But if you like either let me know and I'll let you know what I did.

http://members.iinet.net.au/%7Esailfish/4.jpg

You mentioned sepia...so here is one...?

http://members.iinet.net.au/%7Esailfish/3.jpg

[lisa1969]

nice job on the first one!

[CyberPet]

I stab in the dark here... either in curves or in Levels adjust to bring out more of the exposure (if you look at the histogram in Levels it's pretty far to the left), so you need to pull the rightmost slider to the right and you can also pull the middle slider to the left too (I was very drastic, pulled the middle to 1.50 and the rightmost slider to 220). If you want to bring out more of his face under the hat, you can use the dodge tool to bring out some more there. I also added some more saturation in the image, to give it a lot of summer feel over it.

To make it a sepia, I just did it in Hue/saturation, checked the "Colorize" box and pulled the Hue slider to 25 (to the left) and the Saturation to 15 (also to the left).

It's an absolutely lovely picture!!!!!

http://the-halls.se/edited/expecting.jpg

http://the-halls.se/edited/expecting_sepia.jpg

[Mercy299]

Thank you all so much. I believe I really like the color best after all. This is a photo I will cherish for years to come. Thank you for helping me to bring it to its full potential.

[RAitch]

That was really underexposed... but that's good. You can recover quite a bit.
Here's a really quick repair... just focussing on contrast, a bit of colour, and brightness.

Man, I hate it when you have to save save save to get the image just under 100K. I quality kind of sucks a bit.

OK, LAYER OPACITY AS FOLLOWS
* Selective colour = 100%
* Levels 1 = 100%
* Curves 1 = 58%
* Curves 2 = 51%


SELECTIVE COLOUR VALUES

REDS = 0, 0, 0, 0
YELLOWS = -73, -30, +71, +25
GREENS = 100, -100, +99, +33
CYANS = 0, 0, 0, 0
BLUES = +63, +18, -41, +15
MAGENTAS = 0, 0, 0, 0
WHITES = -28, +6, -5, +44
NEUTRALS = 0, 0, 0, 0
BLACKS = 0, 0, 0, 0

Add a levels adjustment layer to brigten the image as displayed.

Add a curves layer but don't change the curve. Make the blend mode soft light to boost the contrast. opacity is 58%.

Add another curves layer as shown to brighten the faces. click the layer mask and ALT-Backspace to fill the mask with black. Change to the paint brush and change the colour to white. Change the brush to a reasonable size, softest you can get, and opacity somewhere around 50% (toolbar). Paint over the faces.
SHIFT+ALT click on the mask to see what you've painted. Press X to switch colours and undo if you've gone too far. SHIFT+ALT click again to cancel the red quick mask view.
Change the opacity if the effect is too strong. 51% in my case.

[Learner]

Wow an absolutely lovely photograph and the new result is great. They are really going to cherish this forever.

Learner

[RAitch]

OK, Here's another one.

Add a level adjustment layer... just like before.
Add a hue/saturation layer and desaturate the image -100%
Add a blank layer, pick a sepia colour, ALT+Backspace to fill the layer with the colour, and change the blend mode to colour. Adjust the opacity to suit.

Here's where it got interesting. CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+N then CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+E to copy everything that you see to a new layer. Then I used the AutoFX mystical lighting plugin to add some mist effects.

I LOVE THE AUTOFX PLUGINS!!!

[RAitch]

I just realized I was doing this on my notebook on battery power and the display was a little dark. Anyway, play with the settings.

Good luck.

[Bootless]

great pic I really like the idea... My wife is pregnant and I would like try this kind of a "pose"

For the color photo I did a fair bi but I will just run through the main steps quick and If you have any questions just ask ...

1. shadow/highlight %50 shadow %0 highlights
2. hue/saturation ~%10-15 saturation (play)
3. contrast %10 contrast
4. color balance ... midtones -15 towards magenta
5 played with levels a bit
6 selected and tweaked trees a bit (mostly darkend them)
7.ran through neat image

and to make the sepia ...
1. desaturate
2. Go to Image > Adjust > Variations. (great place to play around in to get something different)
3. Move the Fine<-->Coarse slider down one notch less than the middle.
4. Click on More Yellow once.
7. Click on More Red once.
8. Click OK.

again great photo

[condyk]

I think you need to talk to the father!! Judging from the pose he's trying to keep that kid in there :lol:

[RAitch]

Bootless, I like the face brightness in your fixes. I avoided going that bright because I didn't run it through a noise corrector and it was showing quite a bit. Good job.
The skin tone does look a little too red... but that could easily be corrected using curves.

When you say you 'selected and corrected' the trees a bit... how did you select them?
Did you use a selective colour adjustment layer or play with the curves for the individual colour channels? That's a great way to boost contrast for specific colour ranges (green trees, blue skys)

Now seeing your image, I think I should have darkened the trees a bit more too.

[Bootless]

RAitch... thank you for the comments... now that you mention it, the skin tone does seem to have a bit too much red in it.


When you say you 'selected and corrected' the trees a bit... how did you select them?

I guess I should have explained that a bit better....

All I meant was that I used the pen tool to create a selection around the trees so I could adjust them separate from the rest of the photo... I tried to do it in some of the ways you suggested but could not keep it isolated to the trees...

[RAitch]

With either a curves layer or a selective colour layer, you can apply a mask and use the paint brush to restrict the effect.

I like using the selective colour for some reason... but curves is more powerful. Just create a curves layer and change the dropdown from 'master' or 'rgb' or whatever it says to one of the colour channels. You can either raise or drop a curve to increase 2 colours per channel.

The cool thing about using masks over selections is that you can adjust it down the road later in your workflow. You can also paint in black, white, or shades of gray to blend the effect. Plus you can use a series of tools to work with your masks. You can create masks from selections. I'd suggest that too. If you have a tablet (I don't) I hear it's really nice because you can control the size or opacity and various options based on the pen pressure. Once you get used to them, creating masks is a breeze.

As a general rule, if I want to adjust a portion of an image (eg faces), I apply a curve to the entire image paying attention only to the part I want to adjust and ignore the rest. If the sky blows out, that's OK. Then I create a mask and ALT-Backspace to fill it with black to hide the effect. Then paint white where I want that effect back. You don't always have to use 100% flow or opacity. Usually I overdue the effect some, then play with dropping the opacity to fine tune it.

Congrats on using the pen tool. Most people are afraid of it and stay away from it. It's not that bad once you read a tutorial or two and practice for a couple minutes. It's very powerful.

When I adjusted the greens using selective colour in my image, it also enhanced the green in the grass. Personally, I didn't mind that. If you make drastic changes, it'll increase contrast, but might look a little silly if you only adjust colours in certain areas. Again, it's all about playing around.