Fix-it Friday

Here is the original picture of today's Pretty Lady:


*Curves adjustment, to brighten things up a bit.
*Vibrance adjustment, increasing both vibrance and saturation.
*Pioneer Woman's "Boost," then turned down the "zip." This is one that I used all the time. I should figure out what she's done to make this action, as this is one I haven't done that with yet.
*Flatten
*Spot healing brush on the Pretty Lady's forehead, just a little.
*Smoothed out skin tones, just a bit. I used the dropper to guess what skintones she ought to have, then a soft brush at 7%, then toned down the whole thing with an opacity adjustment, because I always loose depth when I do this. Wished I could see the Pretty Lady in person, so I would know what she really looks like; that always makes this part so much easier!
*Flatten again.
*Pioneer Woman's "Define and Sharpen." This is another favorite that I need to figure out what she's done to make it work so nicely!
*Pioneer Woman's "Bring on the Eyes" at about 22%, but the Pretty Lady's eyes are brown, and it doesn't seem to do much for her eyes, though the whites of her eyes benefit. I'm thinking that I've seen a thing for brown eyes somewhere...
*Ah, yes, it was on I Heart Faces. I used the Julie Rivera method from this tutorial. I love tutorials.

At this point, Pretty Lady looks like this:



I like it, but all that lovely background is begging me to play around with some texture stuff; see if I can get it "right" today. Whatever "right" is.

I put in Old Paper 2, from ShadowHouse Creations, changed the blending mode to soft light, then used the "hot pink technique" from the video at the bottom of the post to get the texture, but not the warm color of the texture, off her face. The hot pink thing is around 5:30 in the video, but the whole thing is great. I like it, but I think that for once my texture is more subtle than I like, so I'm going to try adding another one. I picked "bosch," again from ShadowHouse, decreased the saturation till it was B&W, since I didn't think that I needed any more color added, copied, stretched it so it fit the picture with the darker sections going vertically on the barn walls, and changed the blend mode to hard light. The effect was cool on the barn, but not cool on the Pretty Lady, so I added a layer mask. Thinking of how Dana Suggs (contributor #3) made the Pretty Lady pop so nicely from her background, I tried for a similar effect, by masking out her face & shoulders at 100%, then decreasing the opacity of my brush until it was at about 30% when I did her hands. Then, to sort of blend it all together, I did a Gaussian blur on the mask, which got rid of the edges for me. Then, I turned the opacity on the texture down to about 70% and flattened.



Hurray!! I actually like this one! I think this is the first time that I've been happy with a textured picture that I did!

Because it's fun to look at the pictures side-by-side, here they are: