Before and After - Pt2

I thought I would show you another edit. I know some of you are reading this for interest sake and others for learning - I apologise if I talk too much :)

Technical Garb (for those who want to know)
Shot with a Canon 5DMarkii - 24-105 L lens. ISO 160 F/stop 4.0 Apeture 1/100 sec.

I loved my session with this sweet family. My favorite lighting and positioning is at the end of this row of trees at the wonderful Newcaslte Beach. The problem is the permanent garbage cans inside the trees. SO, I enjoy using PS to eliminate the distractions so that when they hang it on the wall, no garbage cans are in sight. :)

Close up of one of the offending areas.

Okay, for those wanting to learn, here is what I did to the image to make it ready to print.

First of all I got rid of the distractions in the photos. I tried the 'auto fill' feature that is on PS5 where you make a circle around the area you dont like and it auto fills it. It sometimes works...and other times it doesn't. This image, it chose not to work (it pulls background from around the offending space - this time it pulled the little boy and put him in place of the garbae bin...so it didn't work) so I manually created the base of the tree using my cloning brush.

I also used this cloning brush to remove the cones above their heads.

Next, I added a little texture to the background. Even though the background had good DOF (depth of feild) with blurring, I wanted a little more and I also wanted to lighten the background to help make the family really pop in the front. So with this texture I can do both with at once.

To add texture, I added the texture over the top of my image as a new layer. I chnaged the opacity to about 50% and then used my eraser to erase the texture of the family at 100%. Once the texture was off the family, I made my eraser work at 50% and used a large brush to erase it around the family in large oval shape and off the front of the image.

Lastly I made the texture about 30% opacity so we got a hint of it for the effect I wanted.

texture I used - it is called Vanilla Sky B&W

Once the texture was how I wanted it, I wanted to warm the image up slightly. I used the action "April Flowers" from 'My Four Hens' . I like it becasue it is a gentle action - it adds a little yellow and a little light and can be adjusted to taste in your layers. I think I used it around 60% for this image.

I used the masking tool to remove the yellow off the faces at 50%.

Next, I opened one final layer. I adjusted the contrast and incresed the midtones to pop the color and I was done.

Lastly, I used a large brush (like 1200 pixels) with a low opacity burn brush (like 9% exposure) to brush the four corners of the image to create some darkness on the edges. This really focusses the eye inwards as your eye is always drawn to the light. I use a low exposure brush as it is always easier to add more darkness but hard to take it out if you have too much :)

There you have it.

Edit time - about 5 mins.