Shoot & Edit: Week 8: Selfies

Yesterday I vowed to my husband that I’d start “working out” for at least 30 minutes every weekday. By “working out” I mean that I’ll “exercise” on the Wii Fit. The routine I’m doing now involves the running, hula hooping and step aerobics for 10 minutes each plus some warm up and cool down games and yoga. For a regular person this might seem like fun and games but for fat ‘ol me it’s a challenge and helps get my heart thumping and oxygen pumping through my veins. And the sweat, well, we won’t go there.

Why am I telling you this? I don’t really know other than I need something to blame for not wanting to blog. Every unused muscle in my body hurts and I can barely move. I know it’ll get better if I keep at it a few more days, but that doesn’t really help me right now. I’m pressing on because I made a goal earlier this year to blog at least thrice weekly and I don’t want to go breaking one vow to fulfill another.

While I’m being off-topic about things that happened yesterday, I also found out from Pepper that one of my self-portraits made the article, 100 Seriously Cool Self Portraits (And Tips to Shoot Your Own)! I recognize several of the portraits included from my Friday Finds: Self Portraits week. Now, I wonder why Google Alerts didn’t tell me about this!?

Anyway, on with the show…

This is the edited version of my self-portrait from earlier this week. You can hover over it to see the original.

I’ll be honest that zero thought went into the selfie so I wasn’t expecting great things.

How I Edited:

The first thing I did was crop it according to the rule of thirds so that my head and camera were in one sweet spot and my son’s head was in another sweet spot. It worked out nicely that way.

Then I ran my Clean Edit Action which is just a shortcut to add levels, curves, clarity and noise reduction adjustment layers.

After that, I just fiddled with it a bit. I can’t really remember what I did, but it doesn’t matter too much because it’s not like this is a masterpiece!

Here’s a similar shot of Mr. Serious in the rear view side mirror. You can hover over it for the straight-out-of-the-camera version.

I like this photo and its transformation much more. You can see the SOOC full size here.

How I Edited:

Again, I started out by cropping according to the rule of thirds and giving it a clean edit.

Playing around with the Levels layer during the clean edit, I found if I set the blending mode to Screen, it lit up my son’s face pretty nicely! I still wanted my Levels corrections, so I duplicated the layer then set the first layer back to Normal blending mode.

The Screen Levels layer was too bright to be used for the entire picture; the gray sky is a bit blown out as it is. So I inverted the layer mask and used a soft white brush, fairly large around 60% opacity to paint Mr. Serious’ face and my sister in law’s arm. I also lightened up the trees in the background a bit.

After that, I wanted to give the sky some dimension, so I used Patti Brown’s Meadow 2 texture from her Gallery collection for the sky only.

Finally, I thought my son’s eye closest to the vehicle looked a bit strange, so I cloned it over to the right just a tad, then I used the Patch Tool to select the catchlight in the eye on the right and duplicate it on the eye on the left. I thought it would come out looking all fakey, but I’m pretty happy with that minor adjustment!

If I haven’t said it already, I’m having a lot of fun with Jill and Ashley’s Shoot and Edit. It’s photography and Photoshop tutorials every week! I’m learning more through Ashley’s Photoshop tutorials than I ever thought was possible. I’m relying on others’ actions less and less and starting to create some of my own where it will save me some time in my editing workflow! If you’ve been wanting to learn more about Photoshop or PS Elements, you’re doing yourself a disservice by not checking out this regular feature!