It took me a while, but I had a lot of fun editing the photos taken at Boa’s birthday party. I really appreciate all the feedback you’ve given me on some of my before and after shots lately. I truly appreciate your honesty! I think the consensus is that I’ve been going overboard a bit. Also, I’ve learned that just as with editing the written word, editing photographs is best when you have another set of eyes (or twelve) taking a look at your work and providing feedback. It’s very beneficial before publishing.
Mark took a photo of his brother, sister in law and niece sitting on our couch. Due to the window behind the couch, the exposure wasn’t too great and the photo was very noisy. I tried salvaging the entire photo, but Whitney and her dog Bert were the most interesting part, so I cropped around her. The problem was that it was still quite underexposed and horribly noisy! I did what I do with most noisy and oddly exposed photos I want to save: I converted it to black and white. Specifically, I used Pioneer Woman’s B&W action. My old method of greyscale conversion was to use the channel mixer to tweak each color until it looked its best. Since I have probably 20-30 B&W actions I’ve long since stopped manually converting them. Even with all the B&W conversion options, I usually end up going back to PW’s B&W. The light and soft light layers make the results very customizable.
I reduced the noise several times during the course of editing, through Filter > Noise > Reduce Noise and used Coffee Shop’s Baby Powder Room to smooth and lighten her skin. There are about 70 CoffeeShop Actions and I haven’t played around with many of them except the retouching ones: Baby Powder Room, Perfect Portrait and Glamour Glow specifically. They are all powerful tools with many different options to retouch portraits. The skin smoothing tools are almost like magic!
I do have a couple of actions I’ve paid for which have the same or similar retouching capabilities as Rita’s CoffeeShop actions. I’ve used them and honestly, I cannot tell the difference! So before you shell out $80 or more on actions, check out what Rita is offering for free!.
Overall, I am really happy with this conversion. I’m not sure how it would look printed large since the resolution was shot to hell with the crop, but I think it would make a cute 4×6!
Wow… great retouch_