First few days as a photographer

I like the fix sapearl did a lot. Can you give me a quick run down of how it was accomplished? If it is pretty lengthy just some thoughts on where to start to see if I can figure it out myself.

mwilleman wrote in post #11164591
I like the fix sapearl did a lot. Can you give me a quick run down of how it was accomplished? If it is pretty lengthy just some thoughts on where to start to see if I can figure it out myself.

Thank you willeman ... appreciate it. My daughters used to be young at one time too.

Well, my main point of focus was to just brighten the face and fix the scrape by his eye. I use CS3. Not having the original RAW file, I actually cheated a little first and went IMAGE -> ADJUST -> AUTOLEVELS to get an approx white balance.

Next, I created a duplicate layer, and then went IMAGE -> AJUST -> EXPOSURE for an increase of about 1.5 stops, give or take a little. I "visually" brightened the face (my monitor is calibrated) and stopped when I thought it was sufficient. And this point is really very subjective.

Then I went LAYER -> LAYER MASK -> HIDE ALL. This creates a mask over everthing, but it will allow me to erase away the "brightened" part of the face which is underneath the layer right now and cannot be seen.

I hit the " B " key for brush, " " for 100% and then start erasing away just the face. The brightened area now appears. Those were the main steps..... I also did a little selective gaussian blur of the cheeks and sharpenning of the eyes, nose and mouth, but that was not critical.

juanpafer wrote in post #11164018
My take

Very nice...I like this one.

Hey Matt you made the jump into DSLR woohooo! I think the pros here covered it well on your picture here soo nothing too add critic wise. you told me the other day your gonna be shooting in RAW so yeah thats gonna help with fixing when the light is not quite right but the moment is soooo keep it up!

cheers Steve

Here's how I would have edited it.

Content warning: NOT AN IMAGE