Covered in Snow

I mentioned yesterday that we got a lot of snow this past weekend. The little guy isn’t overly crazy about playing outside in it, but he’s adjusting slowly. We took him out in the front yard [around our cul-de-sac] for a bit to play. The neighborhood kids were out and around and suddenly felt the need to attack the hubs with snowballs. I had my camera settings all kinds of wonky and was bummed out when I came inside to see how this picture turned out. But, being the kind of person that I am, I decided to see if I could salvage it. The hubs doesn’t smile in pictures very much and I loved the expression on his face. Here’s the before and after.

First I adjusted the layers and brightened the entire photo.

Then, I flattened, and ran the noise reduction filter. I knew the photo would be grainy when I brought so much light back to it, but again, I loved the photo too much too really care.

Afterward, I still wasn’t completely happy with the brightness so I duplicated the background layer and used it in screen. This added a little more brightness to it and gave me the effect I was looking for.

I then ran Coffeeshops “Perfect Portrait.” I adjusted the contrast a bit and flattened.

The photo was a little bit too blue for me, so I used The Pioneer Woman’s warming filter twice, lowered the opacity to 70% on the second layer and flattened again.

Then, I wanted to bring back a little color to his eyes. I used the quick select, highlighted his eyes, used the unsharp mask, and added a cooling filter. I flattened again, added the watermark and voila!

Happy Thursday!