Fix It Friday - on Monday!

I'm taking a break from editing the portrait sessions from this weekend, and I thought I'd try out the Fix It Friday challenge [only a few days late] over at I Heart Faces. To visit the site, click on the button below.

I Heart Faces has a weekly photo contest featuring a different theme each week, and then they also have the for-fun Friday Fix-It challenge. It's basically show and tell for photographers: there's an unedited [SOOC - Straight Out Of Camera] shot to download and then each person edits it however they want. Then they come back and link it up, explaining what they did to make the edits.

Here is the original, followed by a color edit and a black and white conversion. These are done in the classic, authentic style that my work follows.


Color Conversion
I used Lightroom 2 only, to do both of these edits. I am a 99.99% Lightroom user, only opening something in PS if it needs some serious finesse.
I first increased the Exposure of this image, and increased the Blacks as well, until the histogram stretched from the far left edge to the far right edge.
I increased the Brightness just slightly and bumped up the Contrast a little bit.
I used the Spot Healing tool and fixed the blemish on her cheek.
A trick for her skin is to go to the color edit sliders and click on the Luminance tab. Increase the Orange Luminance slider to +17 or so, and then I did the same for the Red Luminance slider, to +5 or 6 or so. This simple tweak drastically improves skin tones.
The last touch I did was to use the Adjustment Brush, set on Clarity. I set it to -100 Clarity, and make the brush maybe 1/2 inch in diameter. Then, I drag the adjustment brush around her forehead, cheeks, chin, nose - the -100 clarity will majorly soften the skin. Be very careful to not drag this over places where you want sharpness/detail, like eyelids, eye lashes, nostrils, lip lines, etc. Just on the skin that you want to smooth out. That is the trick I keep up my sleeve for smooth skin and it works the majority of the time, for dreamy soft skin.
That left me with the color edit I have here!
Black & White Conversion
Then, the B&W edit was done by a preset I created in LR. Basically, it is a convert to Grayscale, and then a few custom tweaks - one of them being to increase the contrast. Then, I adjust the exposure/brightness and black based on the individual image and lighting conditions.
I love these challenges. It's fun to see what other people do to the image!