If you’d like to play along, you can go to I ♥ Faces so you can take a turn playing with this photo.
This little beauty is one of a set of identical triplets. I bet her mother loves having such a beautiful shot of her, all by herself.
Here is the original:
My first thought was, I’d like to make this a quick fix. I usually do all my color correcting and sharpening “by hand”, but for the purpose of speed I wanted to hit a few actions and see some results. Using Photoshop CS3, here are the steps I took:
- Image> Adjustments> Auto Color to remove the yellow (note: I would have done this differently, but auto color is not too shabby!)
- Pioneer Woman’s slight sharpen, twice.
- MCP actions: snap
- MCP actions: color sensation
- rotate, arbitrary to make the brick lines straight.
- Noise Ninja, make a mask, remove bricks and hair from the edit.
- resize for web.
All in all, it took about 3 minutes. In my line of work, when I sometimes have batches of hundreds… time matters. I don’t like to rely on actions for curves and sharpening usually, but for web display – it sure is handy!
For kicks, I made a black and white version, too. She’s stunning.

To compare:












{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Ooo, you’re speaking CS3! Just starting to learn how to use that via tutorials. I’m going to play with those actions {if I can find them!}. Thanks for sharing the details, Darcy!
ok… whats CS3? *Ü* Im trying to remember the name for a program like PS…. but my brain went blank. Maybe in about 10/15 minutes… when Im “not” thinking about it anymore I will remember… lol
Beautiful work dawlink…. Your work is alway good ya know….
Loved the post on boybarian 3. He is such a doll… I wanna scoop him up and hug him… and read to him myself.
Wow, she’s a beauty! Lovely shot, and I love what you did with it!
This is just gorgeous! Great Job!
Do you do photoshop classes? One more thing your are GREAT at!!!
Girl, you rock! You did better than all the ones on the site!
I need all those actions. How do you get them?????