Jamie Cheslock: Time to Pick on ME!

I am having so much fun with Photoshop I could just spit. For those of you who know me and I mean REALLY know me know that is a big statement for me to make! I don't spit, it makes my nauseous to see people spit, I've been known to bawl out strangers for spitting in front of me. Okay, back to Photoshop. Recently I have fallen in love with Actions. Actions are my new lover, (don't tell the old guy I said that.) For those of you who don't know what an action is, in a nutshell it is a command that does a bunch of commands for you to create an excellent final product. I have been spending WAY too much time researching and reviewing different actions on the web and have come up with some really fun ones. Tonight I downloaded a couple of fun actions that I just HAD to try out.

Okay here is the picture that I decided to pick on tonight, yes that's me. Like most women, I rarely see a picture of myself that I like but here is one I like.....well, mostely. HA!

There were some things I didn't like. The background had some things in it that were distracting, my skin has that 44 year old woman (did I just admit my age?) look about it and there are a couple of blemishes I'd like to be rid of. The first thing I did was run an action called "Perfect Skin" this action is wonderful, it does a very slight glausean blur on the photo, stops for you to make any adjustments in the opacity and smoothes out the skin. Okay, now I have smoother skin but it still needs more help. I created a new layer, did a manual glausean blur with a higher opacity that blurred out the background for me. It actually blurs out the entire picture but not to worry, that is what layer masks are for. I did a layer mask and painted over any part of the picture that I didn't want blurred, that of course would be me. :) Okay now I'm almost done but my teeth are a little yellow - that darned coffee that there is no way I'll give up. I dodged my teeth and while I was at it, the whites of my eyes to make them more white. Then I lassoed my eyes and sharped them up a lot to make them pop a bit. My eyes are squinted in the photo making them look small so they needed all the help they could get. Finally, I used the clone tool to get rid of that pesky red dot on my chin and erase that one white hare in my eyebrow. I really liked where this photo was going, it just need a leeeetle more work. I used the "Lovely and Etheral" action to make the colors pop out a bit and then I used the "Slightely Lighten" action because I thought it was a little to dark. Unfortunately, this lightened up my skin a litte more then I wanted, (I've always been proud of my dark skin tones)so luckily for me, before I used the slightely lighten action I had created a new layer (whew) so I did another layer mask and used the brush to bring my skin back to it's original color. Here is what I ended up with.

After adjustments