Me, Me, Me - Edited

Welcome back!  Time to see the edited version of Monday's SOOC shot for Shoot & Edit with Jill and Ashley.  This week's theme is self-portraits or couples.  I went for the self-portrait since it is nearly impossible to get my husband to pose for a photo :) (something I'm working on).

Here were my 2 SOOC shots from Monday ...

Obviously the lighting on this one wasn't great.  Gray, gloomy day.

The lighting on this one is a little better.  And I'm in my comfort zone.  :)

I played around with them in PSE6 and came up with these ...

As usual I did the basic edits in RAW.  The I cropped and ran Coffee Shop's BabyPowder Room action on both.  I didn't remove my wrinkles completely, because, well, they are part of me.  Like it or not.  :)  


One thing that's cool about this action is that I did the smooth/lighten layers on my background also.  You may recall that I used a white sheet as a backdrop to help lighten up the photo since the day was so gray.  Well, I didn't iron the sheet and I could see the creases.  A few passes over the background with the paint brush and the creases are gone.  I wish it was that easy in real life!  :)


And since I prefer pics of me in B&W or sepia, I converted the first photo to sepia ...

To convert to sepia, these are the steps I did (that I learned from Jessica Sprague's Photo Editing: Good-to-great workflow class, which I highly recommend, by the way):
In PSE, copy background layer - move to top if needed.
Go to Enhance -> Adjust color -> Remove color
Create 2 more copies of B&W layer
Top copy - rename to "screen" - change the blending mode to screen and reduce opacity to about 30%
Next copy - rename to "soft light" - change blending mode to soft light and reduce opacity to about 70%
Tweak as needed
To make lighter, increase opacity of screen layer
To add contrast, increase opacity of soft light layer
To convert to sepia: make sure top layer is selected
Click on the "create adjustment layer" icon (the little circle that is half white/half black - or the little yin-yang symbol like I like to call it :))
Choose Hue/Saturation from drop-down menu
Click the colorize button (it will make the photo the color in the foreground color swatch)
To make it sepia, slide the Hue slider to about 35
Move the saturation slider to about 17
Tweak as needed


Here are the side-by-side comparisons ...

As much as I dislike photos of myself, I'm pleased with my results.


To see more self-portraits and couples photos, head on over to Ashley's.
Next week's theme is Spring.  We've had some sunshine the past few days so here's hoping we start seeing some signs of Spring soon!  :)

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