Touch-it-up Thursday, episode 1

Ready to see some of the results from the "I'll do my best to fix your photo contest"?

Since some of you probably came over here to get your daily donkey fix, let's start with Gayle's photo. She wrote: Here's the lovely PrimRose, founder and reigning Queen of the PrimRose Donkey Sanctuary. She could use some help getting the shadow from her hat brim off of her face and doing away with those headless humans in the background.

Gayle took this picture of PrimRose at Shaeffer's 15th birthday party, which was a fundraiser for the PrimRose Donkey Sanctuary. Gayle and all the folks involved in the fundraiser and sanctuary are very special people, and I wanted to make PrimRose's portrait picture-perfect for them.


I replaced the background with a free texture from Shadowhouse Creations, lightened the shadows under the hat brim using curves, and ran Pioneer Woman's Lovely and Ethereal action to soften the harshness of the bright sunlight. I'm pretty pleased with the way this turned out. George and Alan think PrimRose is stunning and keep asking me to get her phone number.

This next photo of happy Haflingers Doc and Pippin is from Cyndi, at Living a Dream. She wrote: I lucked out and caught the boys rearing up in play with each other. It was a gray day, toward evening. There was patchy snow on the ground, a fence in the way and the guys are somewhat washed out by being back lit. I love the shot as I rarely see them rear up and play...and usually don't have a camera. I'd love to see the image brightened up!


Cyndi's original image was very large - 17" x 12.8" at 180 dpi. I'll do an entire post some day on the importance of starting with large images whenever you plan to do any processing and retouching, but until then, can we all agree to set the image size on our cameras to at least something on the order of 2896 x 1944? If you're using a point-and-shoot, choose the largest size/highest quality possible. Thank you very much.


I loved working on Cyndi's image because these two cutie-patooties kept looking at me as I was taking down their fence. Maybe they thought they'd be able to escape when I was done. Anyway, I used a combination of the clone, patch and spot healing brush tools to remove the fence and other distractions. Then I lightened it with curves, made the color warmer, added a thin gaussian blur layer on the non-horse areas, popped the color a bit with Pioneer Woman's Boost action, and cropped it. The happy Haflingers are showing their true colors now.

I'll post more before and afters from the contest next week. Until then, go find your camera manuals and figure out how to check those image size and quality settings. You never know when there might be another opportunity to win photo surgery from Rancher-Woman, PhD (Doctorer of Photography).

p.s. Contest winners, if you've sent me a photo and haven't gotten it back, not to worry. I hope to finish them all this weekend.