the nitty gritty

Would you believe it...I had one, yes, ONE!!! request for the "nitty gritty" for my last photoshop touch-up! Oh yeah! :-) To give credit where credit is due, the "nitty gritty" was termed by an old friend (and ski buddy); the same photographer extraordinaire that inspired me to get my camera out of the bag, dust it off, and figure out how to use it.

In layman's terms, the "nitty gritty" could mean "what the heck did you do to that photo to make it look so great??!!" Or it could mean "what settings did you use on your camera to make your picture look so glorious??!!" Anything along those lines.

OK, excuse me for a moment while I talk shop. After the aforementioned "request," I scrambled to figure out what the heck I had done to that picture of Drew. When you save a photo as a jpeg file, you lose all your layers. In other words, I had no idea what I did! I hopped on the computer at 11:00 at night, racking my brain to figure out what actions I had used. I couldn't come up with an exact replica, but this one is close. (I re-did the touch up, so the nitty gritty does go with this picture below).



First, I ran my own "curves" adjustment. Pulled the little do-hickey up, and to the left a bit

Ran the Pioneer Woman's "warmer" action at 60%

Used MCP Actions' "non-destructive burn tool" at 10% on the background to darken it a little, making Drew pop out a bit more

Used a free photoshop action called "haze cutter." I ran it at 50%, (4.5 pixels), only on Drew's eyes

Used another free action "Aly's Basic Boost" (it's some type of curves adjustment)

Oh, and I used the "healing brush tool" to clone out a little applesauce around Drew's mouth.

SEE???!! Wasn't that FUN??!! I could look at 'before and after's' all day! I really could.

OK, my friend. With this "nitty gritty" I'm serving the ball back to you. Now it's YOUR turn to do one on your blog. ;-)