{flashy} Fix-It Friday #136

It has been quite a while since I have participated in Fix-It Friday over in the I Heart Faces community. When I saw the image up for editing today I knew I wanted to play! Editing my own photos, I often stick to basic clean edits but sometimes it is a nice break to have a little fun with it. I knew looking at this picture, by Angie Arthur Photography, that I wanted to give it a saturated urban feel. 

Here is what I did for my final image, it may look like a long list but each step is fairly basic

Edited in Photoshop CS4

• Cropped
• Selected a portion of the brick wall, feathered to 20px and copied to a new layer to get rid of the small amount of window that was left after cropping. 
• Levels adjustment layer on each channel (you can see my tutorial on this here) 
• Duplicated the background image and set to Overlay blend mode, reduced to 80% opacity and masked back her shirt to bring back some detail
• Duplicated the background image and set to Multiply blend mode, reduced to 40% and masked back the girl. 
• Duplicated the background image and ran a High Pass Sharpen with a radius of 20px and set to vivid light blend mode, reduced opacity to 35%
• Duplicated the background image and set to Linear Light blend mode, reduced to 10%
• Selective Color adjustment layer, selected Reds and reduced magenta to -50 and upped yellow to +5
• Gradient adjustment layer with a violet/green/orange gradient, reduced opacity to 30% and masked back the girl at 50% opacity to reduce discoloration in her skin. 
• Flatten layers and save. 

{FLASHY} Levels Tutorial

One of the most basic, quick & easy ways to attack a photo that you want to edit should be levels. According to me anyway. And when I say quick, I mean it. It shouldn't take more than a minute. So why not give it a try? Levels are your friend!

It is absolutely the first thing I do when I open a picture in Photoshop. It may not be the last, but it certainly gives me a much better jumping off point for more in-depth editing.

Open your picture in Photoshop and click on the adjustment layer button

Don't laugh. Yes. It is a picture of bread. Delicious, delicious bread. Perhaps I will be nice enough to post the recipe for this yummy beer bread.

In the levels adjustment box click on the dropdown next to RGB and select the red channel.

So far so good? The rest is just as simple. All the images "data" is displayed in black. All you want to do is pull in the left and/or right points to where the data starts.

For the red channel, the left side stayed at zero, the right side pulled in from 255 to 196. Now my picture is rather red.

Don't freak out just yet!

You want to do the same on the green channel

And once again on the blue channel.

Looking at this now, I think it is a bit too blue. If I were to go back and re-do this I would probably pull the left point in to about 10-15. Although there is data at the starting point, it doesn't really pick up until you start moving a little right.

So how much did that little bit of work really help improve this image? A lot, I'd say!

Now, this isnt exactly an image I wanted to put a lot of editing time in to. I could easily stop here as it is decent enough as it is, but I did do a tiny bit more tweaking. This was maybe another two minutes or so of work. We'll save those details for another day.