Week 18 good to WOW edit Mother's Day

Blogger seems to have misplaced several people's posts.  They say they are restoring data still, so there is hope.  At one point yesterday I was able to copy my html data so I wouldn't have to rewrite this post since it kept disappearing and reappearing.  I'm still waiting for blogger to restore the original, but in the meantime I was able to copy and paste and restore it myself.  

So even though I limited myself to only two photos, I experimented with them a lot and now don't even have a clue what I like, but I did get a lot of practice in on many different techniques.  Good for my editing skills in the long run, not so good for you.

Here is my basic edit of my friend, Julie.

But she and I talked about that what is "in" right now seems to have a more glossy feel and this seems to be the perfect time to experiment with trying to find it.  So I did more touch-up (like erasing some fly away hair and some skin smoothing and added a little color to her lips--her request) and ran the mini-fusion action--which I do not understand at all.  I'm not sure it reaches the glossy look.  It still looks like her--beautiful!

Then for fun I ran a Velvet Cream Action:

With a few adjustments.  I'm not sure what I think.  I tried a lot of other actions, too, but I didn't like how they took away the color in her hair.  However, I am going to show you a Black and White (and I did not draw her hair color back in, because well, that would look ridiculous, I think--I have no way of actually knowing because I didn't try it!)

I believe I landed on the BW conversion done with Pioneer Women's Beauty.

Then I had not created my post when Ashley's tutorial came on-line, so I had to try some more.  I kind of misunderstood at first and used gradient fill instead of gradient map.  It actually made for an interesting edit, but I like the gradient map better.  Here are both of them at once to speed this post along.  I am actually very excited about what a gradient map can do.  It is kind of like adding a fill color but with a little more control.

Here are the side by sides of the earlier edits for comparison:

Anyone still interested in the flower conversion?  There aren't as many, I promise!

The original flower had the tip cut off.  I had one picture very similar in composition except it had more of the tip and bad focus on the middle of the flower, so I added it's tip to my flower.  My cropping choices became somewhat limited after the merge, but I like square crops anyway.  I also ran Nice and Easy with my own hue adjustments.

First Edit

Then, now that I had the hang of using a gradient map, I experimented with them.  I landed on a rainbow map that went from orange-blue-purple-red-orange-yellow on soft-light with 41%.  I also added a copy of the background on a soft-light layer.   Those are the only differences from my first edit to this flower:

Here is the before and after for comparison:

Whew, I'm done, and it isn't even my longest edit post!  I hope you go try out gradient maps and be sure to visit Ramblings and Photos for more Mother's Day edit!