Fix-It Friday :)

Time again for my new weekly addiction, Fix-it Friday! Since last week was my first time doing this, I decided that this week, I would do a few more edits. And because I forgot to mention last week, I use Photoshop CS3 and a bamboo graphic tablet. Here's the original:Don't know where they find these cuties, but I just love his cheeky grin. This original photo is pretty dark, so I did a levels adjustment to brighten it up overall, but I didn't want to lose too many of those dark tones. There's also not a lot of color, so I did a hue/saturation layer to bring up the cyans and some of the yellows and magentas.....I just realized how long this whole explanation is going to be....ugh. ANYWAY, here's the first edit. Just a basic "fix".
On this second one, I wanted to make it a little more dramatic. So, I turned it into a black and white image, sharpened it (b/c I don't like blurry b&ws), and did a levels adjustment to bring out some contrast. What I didn't mention before is that I went in with the paint brush to put in some highlights. Since it's so dark, there's not a lot of depth in the photo. I used white on the PB set to about 5% and painted some white highlights on his lips, cheeks, eyes, nose, etc...just to give the illusion of some natural light. Then I cropped it with a little rotation.Finally, I did another digital painting. I think I might try to do one of these every week. I know it looks similar to the first one, but I used the smudge tool along with a ton of other tricks to give it a oil-painting effect. Instead of explaining everything here, I might just do a tutorial in another post later if anyone actually wants to learn this whole process.

Soooo, those are my edits for this week. Be sure to head over to iheartfaces.com to learn lots of other tricks and see everyone's great submissions for this week. :)