Here is my edit for this week.

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This week’s theme is “Pink” in honor of Breast Cancer awareness week.

Here is my entry:

Be sure to check out I ♥ Faces to see all the amazing photos that were entered in this week’s contest.

What an adorable photo!

This was a fun one to work on. It really didn’t need that much work. I just brightened it up with curves, color corrected with curves, and used the spot healing brush and the patch tool to clean up the face. Then I sharpened it and resized it for the web.

That’s it!

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Here is my entry for this week’s I ♥ Faces challenge. The theme this week is blue.

Be sure to check out I ♥ Faces to see all the amazing photos that were entered in this week’s contest.

I did a photo shoot for some friends of mine a few weeks ago. Their little boy is so adorable, but he wasn’t interested in smiling for me at all. I got tons of contemplative looks. This one stood out for me, so I decided to make it my entry for the week.

Be sure to check out I ♥ Faces to see all the amazing photos that were entered in this week’s contest.

This week at I ♥ Faces the theme is “Back to School”. Of course on Emma’s first day of 2nd grade we got up early so we could take pictures I took a bunch of her at home that I really like, but for this contest I wanted to enter something that really showed it was the first day of school. I always drive Emma to school because we live too close for her to take the bus, but too far for her to walk. We got there a little bit early so we took some photos around the school. Here she is in front of her classroom door.

Be sure to check out I ♥ Faces to see all the amazing photos that were entered in this week’s contest.

This week at I ♥ Faces they are taking a break from the usual contests. This week they wanted us to post some photos from when we first got interested in photography. As soon as I heard about this theme I immediately thought of a photo I took of Nora. I remember I had just started reading about composition and how important it was to “get close”. I started practicing that a bit and I was just thrilled with this photo I captured of Nora.

I look at it now and I am a little bit embarrassed The flash lighting is terrible and the photo is over-exposed in a bunch of places. I was so excited about her eyes, but now when I look at it, I don’t even think they are very sharp.

I was also really proud of these next two photos. I remember thinking that I had done such a good job on them. Now I look at them and I see so many places where I could improve.

The first one of Nora in her pumpkin costume is underexposed and out of focus. The framing on the second one is terrible–my subject’s face is in the center of the photo with a bunch of wasted space at the top. Also the lighting is not very good. Her face is in the dark and there are shadows and bright spots on her skin.

But it was a fun exercise to go back and look at my old photos. First it was fun to see how much my kids have grown and changed. But it was also fun to see how much my photography has changed.

Here are some of my more recent images.

This photo is similar to my first one of Nora. This one is outside, but I paid attention to the light so that I could get some good sparkle or “catch lights” in her eyes. This photo is properly exposed and very sharp. I also learned about white balance recently and started correcting the skin tones. This one looks so much better to me than that first one I took of Nora!

Just for fun here are a few more of my recent photos. I can see in all of them that I have learned how to “see the light”. Now when I take a photo I pay attention to how the light looks and how it will effect the photos. I watch to see that there will be light reflected in the eyes of my subjects because it really helps make the person look so much better. I have also gotten so much better at the framing and composition of my photos.

My photography journey has been a great learning experience. I have really enjoyed reading and learning. I hope to keep learning all the time and I hope my photography continues to improve.

Go check out I ♥ Faces to read about the photography journey of some other great photographers!

Here is what I did:
1) Ran Noiseware on a new layer. Lowered opacity to 25%
2) Increased the brightness using curves
3) Corrected the color using curves
4) sharpened the eyes using MCP Action’s Eye Doctor
5) Sharpened for web
6) Rotated the photo just a bit to straighten it out
7) Cropped

Here is my final image:

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First I opened this photo in ACR. I bumped up the exposure and then used recovery to bring down some of the blown out areas on the right side of his face.

Then I opened it in Photoshop CS3. I first did a defog and then started working on the color correction. I use the CMYK method of skin tone correcting. I took a great class from Jodi at MCP Actions called Color Fixing. If you want to learn about how to color correct skin, you should definitely take her class!

Then I did a hue saturation layer to bring down some of the reds. I inverted the mask and just painted on the parts where I wanted to erase the redness.

Then I used MCP actions eye doctor to sharpen the eyes a little.

I cropped it and here is what my final results look like:

Go check out I ♡ Faces to see all the other Fix-it Friday participants!

Be sure to check out I ♡ Faces to see all the amazing photos that were entered in this week’s contest.