After Before Week 45 Challenge

For this week’s challenge, I picked a photo from a shoot last weekend. We were very lucky because this young lady was only available at what should have been an awful time of day for lighting (2:00-3:00 pm), but the day was sunny with a thin layer of clouds almost across the whole sky. It helped to mock the golden hour better than I could have imagined. Anyway, back to this particular image. I recently purchased some Photoshop actions from Little Lusker, and I was excited to try a few out for this shoot.

First, here’s the original image:

I opened it in PhotoShop and used these settings on the RAW converter:

And here’s the image with those settings:

Really, super close to what I wanted. The first action I used is called Eye Enhance from the Envision set. After adding the mask layer, I set my brush to this:

And carefully brushed just her eyes.

Subtle change, but worth it when you blow it up big and up close. Next, from the same set, I used Vivid and reduced the opacity to 43%:

And finally used Peppy Backlight with an opacity of 55% for the final image:

To see more examples from this challenge, visit After-Before Week 45 Challenge.

Click the image above for rules on joining the fun!