fix it friday #96

It's Friday again, which means I Heart Faces is running another editing challenge. The description summed it up well: "this photo has it all...noise, underexposure, distracting elements and more."

SOOC

my effort

first I opened the raw file in Adobe Raw, didn't alter the white balance, but upped the exposure to +1.5, brightness to +59, contrast to +41, the clarity right up to +83, vibrancy to +31 and saturation to +53 (I was trying to get some colour into the sky).

I then took the image into PSE5 where I cropped, made a duplicate layer on which I used the clone stamp to remove who I've now learnt is Andrea's brother Jon, and a few other bothering bits. Made another layer to darken highlights and applied CoffeeShop's Barista where I did the levels adjustments, sharpened and dodged the white bits that were still popping out at me. I flattened at this point, probably needn't have, but I did.

The sky was still too flat and white, so I made yet another duplicate layer, and used it to apply an LBB filter. I gave the layer a mask, and painted out the grass, people and red of the barn. Then I warmed things up a bit with PW's Sunshine action at 23%. Oh, yes, then saved and opened it again in neat image and let it do its stuff to filter the noise.

As usual, it's probably a very long winded way of doing things, and I'm not entirely convinced by the results, but I did my best!