Blueprint: Taking Your Old Images and Making Them New Again

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Do you ever look back at your images from years ago and think, “wow, I have improved.” Or “I was not as good as I thought…”

Well I accidentally went into a folder of images from 4 years ago while looking for something, and I found a photo I remember loving.  I thought this was the top of my career.  I could not get better.  At this time my daughters did modeling for some eBay designers.  They too thought this photo was incredible.

Anyway, I decided to play around with it in Photoshop to see if I could make it better. Here is what I did:

  1. I started by duplicating the background layer.  I used the patch tool and the clone tool – back and forth to get rid of stay hairs on the eye and crossing over the face.
  2. I used the patch tool and the clone tool to get rid of that double catch light on the left eye of the photo. It would not have bothered me if both eyes had two, but the one eye did.
  3. I then flattened and duplicated again.  This time I patched the heavy under eye shadows.  I brought the layer opacity to 45% so some of the original eye creases showed lightly.
  4. Next I flattened and worked on exposure. I ran MCP Peek-a-Boo from the Complete Workflow Action Set.
  5. I then wanted more definition in the midtones so I ran MCP Crackle from the Quickie Collection Actions.
  6. After this I wanted to make the tee she had on a touch more vivid, so I used MCP Finger Paint from the Quickie Collection.
  7. I decided though I like contrast that for this shot a flatter lighting may look good.  After all she was a little girl here, just turned 4 I think.  So I used MCP Touch of Light and with a 30% opacity brush selectively lightened some of the shadows on her face.  I also added some highlights in her hair using this same layer.
  8. Lastly I used a “Skin Trick” to get rid of the blown red channel on the left side of her face on the photo.  I set the brush opacity to 15% and sampled a skin color.  Then I made a new blank layer and painted on those areas.  I added a layer mask to clean any over spill.

blueprint-little-e1 Blueprint: Taking Your Old Images and Making Them New Again Blueprints Photoshop Tips

I would love to hear your questions or thoughts.  I am ready to take a few more customer blueprints for future weeks too.  So if you have a before and after with step by step directions using MCP Actions and you think it is amazing, I would love to see it and consider featuring you.  Thanks! Jodi

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  1. Laura Hickman on May 30, 2014 at 4:40 pm

    They are both lovely. But I have to say the B&W is absolutely luminous.

  2. Daisey Lim on May 31, 2014 at 12:25 pm

    I love them both but I think I like the one in color just a tiny bit better. Those eyes!

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