How'd you do it, Maureen

I posted a while back about my inability to use curves successfully. I received some very good advice and have been slooooowly improving. I had particular reference to the following post, where our erstwhile moderator Maureen fixed up a post in a truly amazing fashion. At the time of my post, I couldn't put my finger on it.

This is it:
http://www.photography​-on-the.net/forum/showthre​ad.php?t=111549

How'd you (she) do it? Not so much the contrast improvement, but the eye color is incredible.

Come forth, Maureen and others. Perhaps a post of the original curve box and after you were done?

Thanks
mark

well all i did was open it in photoshop, levels, used the white dropper on her shirt to correct the white balance, then selected just the color of her eyes and did a slight hue change and increased the saturation. here is the result.

HOSTED PHOTO
please log in to view hosted photos in full size.

Excellent. I was unaware of the ability to select the color of the eyes and just affect those. I'm not sure I know how to do that.

you could use any of the selection tools really, lasso would work good to manually select around the color of the eyes. But I did it in mask mode. but how you get the selection really does not matter.

Heres a quick edit, slight shadows and highlights, then selective curves on the eyes, then saved, next I ran it through neat image but it only needed slight correcting, then i pasted it over the original image and erased everything except the skin, then I used auto levels and a slight curve, in all about 10 minutes work.

Bruce

HTTP response: 404 | MIME changed to 'text/html' | Byte size: ZERO

The original image (even the low-res jpg we can see here) has plenty of content to allow much latitude of adjustment in shadows, highlights, etc. If this was shot in raw, I'd bet it could easily be finessed into a stellar portrait. Shots with no blown highlights, no lost shadow areas, etc. are great for manipulation.

I tried a hand at it. Came out too plasticky. I'd love to have the original file to work with.

HTTP response: 404 | MIME changed to 'text/html' | Byte size: ZERO

I'd be glad to supply a full res original for everyone to work with. Seems a lot of people like the picture. My girlfriend was extremely happy with the compliments and edits people have done.

Anyone have somewhere to host the .cr2 file? I don't at the moment.

email it to me. I have a decent server.