The editing process

Let me show you a before and after shot of Miranda. The straight out of the camera shot is just fine, but the colors are muted, Miranda's face is shaded, and the picture lacks somthing...

First I altered the color curve of the whole picture, increasing contrast, pumping up the back light, and increasing the midtone highlights. After that, I changed the skin tone in the picture to more tan and more reds, just to brighten her skin. I zoomed in on her pretty green eyes and selected each one, applying an unsharp mask.

Then I worked with layers. I am not going to go into the details because I highly doubt anyone is visiting this site in hopes of learning anything from my limited knowledge of photoshop. Everything I've learned is from trial and error and from the many very helpful websites and blogs I frequent. Pioneer Woman goes into great detail about each step of her editing process and I've learned a lot from her.

For those who already know PS, here is a brief description of what I did. I applied a glassier blur (20) to the second layer with a screen layer. Then, I duplicated the glassier blue, but changed the layer to an overlay. I played with the opasicty until the second layer was about 50% and the top layer (the third layer) was light, about 25%.  Finally, I erased the top 2 layers just on her eyes, so they really pop through the otherwise romantic blur.