A Little Photo Enhancing Tutorial

I have three projects in the works (two simple crafts and one building project) that I hope turn out okay and if so I plan on doing tutorial for those, but thanks to the girls being sick all last week and Hurricane Sandy none of them are finished or photographed yet. I am hoping I'll have at least one of them ready soon, though! In the meantime, I thought I would share another little Photoshop tutorial. This one will focus on just a few quick things you can do to kind of "clean up" and brighten a shot up a bit without any major changes. This comes in handy for just simple snapshots and for photos that no setup is done beforehand and therefore need a little"pop".

Technically speaking the photo I am using isn't a great shot, but that's the point of this tutorial - taking just a basic snapshot and enhancing it a bit. For this photo I added a slight pop to Lillie's eyes, cloned out a few things, sharpened her face and hair a bit, cropped it, and then ran an action for a pop of color. I'll show you each one:

The first thing I do is open the photo I want to work on in Photoshop CS5 and choose my brush size and then click on Pioneer Woman's "Bring on the Eyes" action.

I zoom in on her eyes and brush over them and then lower the percentage so they aren't too bright.

Once I've very slightly brightened her eyes I flatten my layers.

Then I use the clone tool (5th one down on the toolbar on the left)

Using the clone tool I then get of the little spot where Lillie had bit her lip earlier and lighten the shadows under her eyes. After that I clone out the stop sign behind her.

Now it's time to do a little sharpening. I used the "Sharpen This" action from Pioneer Woman. For this image I chose to just sharpen her face and hair. I chose a larger brush for this and set the opacity at 50% to start with.

And now I just use the crop tool and crop my image just a bit.

And now that I am done with the editing I run Paint the Moon's Rainbow Bright Action from the Sublime Set. It's one of my favorite's!

I heightened the opacity on the "Make it Darker" level so that it wasn't too light.

And there you have it. Nothing fancy, but a nice boost to a simple snapshot!

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 I hope you all are having a lovely week!