Week 9 Filters, Dodge & Burn

This was a fun week for me.  I feel like I am really starting to get the hand of what Photoshop can do!  I think it helps that I purchased a book called the missing manual from Photoshop Elements 9.  I am able to actually look up the information and retrieve it easier that trying to remember which tutorial I read it in.

My first picture is the original version of the supermoon I took last week.

Next is the picture with the filter applied.  First, I increased the brightness and the contrast of this photo.  Then I applied the texture filter "mosaic tiles" set the tile size to 35, and grout width to 5.

My second photo is of my youngest daughter Kira in a karate tournament a couple of weeks ago.  She is doing a one-handed cartwheel.

First I cropped the photo, to make Kira bigger, and decrease some of the unecessary background.  Then I applied the stylize filter "glowing edges".  I increased the edge width to 3, brightness to 16, and smoothness to 5.  I think this is a very cool picture!

Next is for the dodge and burn option.  This is a photo of one of my nurses newborn baby still at the hosptial.

 

The dodge and burn tool took me a few tries to actually figure out what I was doing.  Once I got the hang of which brush stroke size to use, and to only hit over the area once and wait to see desired effect, it was much easier to work with.  What I did was utilize the dodge tool at the 300 brush stroke size, to lighten Calvin's neck line, hand, forehead areas, as well as his mother's chest and shadows.  Then I used the burn tool to darken the background floor, his mother's fingers, and cheek to increase the balance of light.