I love before and after photos, it’s so fun to see what each photographer does in their processing. I decided to do a before and after of this snapshot of Colin from today in the yard, it was a little difficult due to the huge bruise on his face. In his attempts to learn how to climb, he fell and hit the bottom shelf on a coffee table. Mommy and Daddy were not amused! The bruise looks a little worse than it because there might also be some ketchup smeared on his face. Yes I do put ketchup onto my son’s all natural organic gluten free chicken tenders…and he loves it!

Here is the image SOOC (Straight Out Of the Camera) opened in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR)

I start in ACR on all my images (I have Lightroom and I like it, but ACR is just easier). I adjusted the temperature of the image by using the dropper and sampling the golf ball in Colin’s hand.  I moved the recovery slider a tad because there was a small area on the golf ball showing some clipping.  I also adjusted the clarity and vibrance, pretty small adjustments because overall I was happy with the image in terms of exposure, blacks, etc.

I opened the photo in Photoshop. The first thing I do in Photoshop, on every image, is to make a new layer by pressing Control J (Command J). Then I zoomed in (Control +) to see the problem area of the bruise, the drool from his lip, and an older injury where Colin put his tooth through his bottom lip. Don’t envy me.

I love the patch tool and use it whenever possible, but unfortunately it doesn’t work for this kind of thing all the time. I decided to use the clone tool set at opacity around 20%.

You keep working with the clone tool set on Normal, and also with this type of bruise, set on Lighten until the bruise is faded. Then I was able to use my beloved patch tool on the drool and lip injury.

On most images I do a little bit of eye sharpening. I do this vary sparingly! Sometimes if the photo is very sharp with great catchlights, I don’t even sharpen the eyes because they start to look fake. This image is just so-so and I feel like it could benefit with a little sharpening. Here I have selected the eyes and I use a high pass filter in order to sharpen.

Next I add a curves layer. There is no method to this, at least not for me, for some there may be. I just adjust the curves to my liking.

My final adjustment is to add a Levels layer. Again I don’t have a method here, I adjust to my liking and that’s it.

At this point I’m done with the image. If this were a client image, or one I wanted to share on the web, I would resize and sharpen for the web. Since this is just a shot I’d like to share with Granny, I will save it as a jpeg and be done.  I also have to say that these bumps and bruises are all part of it, and I’m not trying to “erase” that they ever happened, but we don’t want to give Granny a heart attack, either!

A side by side comparison:

I hope this tutorial was helpful and I’d love to hear your comments!