I heart Photoshop

A few weeks ago, I entered some photos in the iheartfaces logo challenge. None of my pictures were chosen (bummer) but I thought maybe it would be interesting to see the original of one of the photos and how I edited it in Photoshop.

This is the original photo, SOOC.

It's a fun one of the kiddo. I still need to work on my composition, and, in hindsight, I probably could have cropped it a bit tighter to his face. Plus, I know the hat is situated a little low and covers his eyes, but I still like it.

What I wanted to do was take out the Latham Seeds logo on the hat and put "I <3 faces" on there instead.

I started off by using the Magic Wand Tool to select the green of the logo. You can hold the shift key down and click to choose multiple areas. Alternatively I could have used the Polygonal Lasso Tool (and it probably would have been faster).

Once I had the logo selected, I refined the edge (Select-->Refine Edge) slightly to encompass the few pixels around my selection.

You can adjust the sliders and see in the preview how the selection will look. After I had that set to how I wanted, I adjusted the hue (Image-->Adjustments-->Hue/Saturation) of the green to try and get it back to closer yellow like the background.

NOTE: I have the Colorized button checked on the Adjustments box. It helps when you want an all-over color change like this.

You can see that the green is more yellow now. It's not the best blending job, but it's better than it is as green.

After I adjusted the hue, I went back and used the cloning tool to fix everything. I could have used it from the very beginning, but when I first tried it on the green logo, it came out looking extremely fake.

Cloning was a very time-consuming process. I wanted to make sure the knit looked as realistic as possible. It didn't have to be perfect because I would be putting the "i heart faces" logo on there, but I didn't want it to look like I'd Photoshopped the heck out of it (even though that was exactly what I'd done).

This is what it looked like when I finished. Obviously not perfect, but not too bad.

Now it's time to add the "i heart faces" logo.

I used the polygonal lasso tool to copy areas of the green into the "i" "<3" and "faces"

And, voila!

I did a little tweaking with the eraser and the Transform-->Warp tool to make it look like it was more natural and followed the curve of his head in the hat.

The picture itself is still a little blah, so I ran Pioneer Woman's Fresh and Colorful action, set the opacity of that layer to 79 percent. I also ran her Bring on the Eyes action. Because his eyes are kind of hidden, I kept that at 100% opacity.

The final result:

Now, that probably took me about 2 hours, at least, to Photoshop everything. And now that I've let it sit and gone back to it, I can see other things I could have done to make it better.

But it's always fun to play around in Photoshop and test my skillz.