iHeartFaces: Week 29 -- Silly Faces

This picture was taken a few months ago, when I took my girls out to meet their new little cousin. With the help of one of my sisters-in-law, I got this pic of me and my 2-year-old holding my nephew. My daughter's proud, excited little face at getting to hold her cousin is one reason I chose this pic for the "silly" category, as well as the expression that my nephew is making. It cracks me up how he's looking at me as if to say, "Who the heck is THIS??"



Comments and critiques are always appreciated!

Please visit iheartfaces.blogspot.com for lots more entries!

Fix-It Friday #23

Well, I thought I'd try my hand at another Fix-it Friday picture, and for the first time I used (mostly) PSE7 to do it. I played with certain features of this one more than usual in (probably) quirky ways, but for the most part I left the rest of the picture pretty similar to the original. That probably doesn't make any sense until I explain it, though. :-)

Here is the original photo, taken by the writer of this blog:



Here is my edit:



What I did:
* First of all, I wanted to crop the picture down to get this cute little guy on one side. But to do that, I kept having to crop out most of the pretty flowers. So I figured, what the heck... I'll move the flowers. So I did:
-- Selected the flowers using the Quick Selection tool.
-- Created a new layer via copy.
-- Used the Move tool to move it upward and over to the left a little.
-- Flattened the image.
-- Used the Clone Stamp tool to blend it in a bit.

* Next, I was not crazy about how the colors of his shirt clashed with the flowers. So I changed the colors of his shirt. :-)
-- Selected most of the shirt.
-- Turned down the saturation.
-- Played with the hue until it more or less matched the flowers. (I didn't even have to play with the individual surf boards on his shirt... At whatever hue it was, they all suddenly matched at the same time!)

* Then I turned to the more minor points of lighting and color, and that was the easy part.
-- Lightened the shadows a bit.
-- Brought up the midtone contrast a little.
-- Brought up the overall contrast a tiny bit.
-- Sharpened it some.

* Then I used the clone stamp tool (turned down to about 20% opacity) to lighten the dark spots under his eyes.

* And finally, I added a vignette. For this, I had to leave PSE7 and go back to my old standard Picnik, because I cannot for the life of me figure out how to do a decent vignette in PSE. If anyone has any advice on that matter, please let me know! :-)

I am still very new to Photoshop, so if this looks like a rookie's work... it is, lol. If you have any other comments or critiques on my fix, or advice on using PSE7, I would love to hear them! Thanks for visiting!