Love Your Shot! | Link-Up!

Found another fun website for photographers called 'love that shot'... (they've got the cutest blog button!) They are hosting a photo challenge called "Your favorite faces" and the winner will receive a $100 gift certificate from Florabella Actions and Textures which I love, love, love!!!  So... I thought I'd give it a shot! (no pun intended...hee hee!)  I recently did a little photo session with my daughter for fun.  We had a little Mother-Daughter outing to CityPlace here in West Palm Beach, FL (great shops, restaurants and a little bit of culture -- for Florida).  It was near dusk and the lighting was low and my daughter was a little embarrassed to be posing in front of people so I rushed and... the whole session was a little fuzzy and I was totally bummed.  But I still loved the photos because the essence of her spirit is captured in them. Instead of scrapping the whole session of photos, I decided to have fun and play with a couple of the photos.  They may not be 'technically' wonderful, but I can make them artistically beautiful...something special and creative of one of my most favorite faces of all...my daughter, Alexandria.

SOOC

So I took this photo that was a little fuzzy and sharpened it a little more to increase the quality of the photo.  Cropped out the statue to the right and then applied a freebie action that I fell in love with called Creamy Butter (created by Gina Miller that I found at The Lilypad).  It really does add a little creaminess to the skin! I almost stopped there...she's just so darn adorable...but the out-of-focus face made me crazy so...I decided to make the photo look painterly...

Beautiful creamy skin!

I added a soft green mineral texture set to overlay, masked out her face and then, with a paintbrush texture tool, added some sweeping texture strokes to create sweeping movement around the face.  The final results!

Beautiful Alexandria!

Close up shot of the texture

Posting photos on the web makes me crazy because a lot of times you lose the details of the photo (and I am such a details kind of girl! LOL).  So here is a closeup of the texture of the face.  Anywho...it was fun to play and since Photoshop allows you to do everything in layers, whatever you don't like you just simply remove that layer and your right back to the beginning with the ability to start a new creation.  Gotta love it!

Hope everyone is having a wonderful day.  Make time to play today!