Photoshop Edit: Kely

I didn’t want to edit this photo. It was obvious that it would be difficult. It was one of the last photos that we took, and Kely’s hair was very messy (lesson learnt - keep brushing) and the dress was covered in sand. It’s also very grainy (it was getting dark very fast). Let’s go through what I’ve done.

The photo out of the camera looked like this:

I did some basic corrections of brightness, cropped it and fixed the angle of the horizon.

The skirt was wet and translucent which created weird spots on the photo (above) - I fixed that too.

And lastly, the most time-consuming part was the hair. I removed the overwhelming amount of flyaways and “brushed” the strand of hair behind Kely’s face. And added a bit more wind in the hair.

I removed the grain (not visible on a small picture like this), and removed a couple of small distractions.

I fixed the saturation of the dress - the wet part of the dress was not saturated enough.

I did minor hue corrections and mainly a lot of dodging and burning to remove odd shades in her face and on her back.

I improved the skin colour and overall brightness and contrast.

I added a bit of beautiful shine to Kely’s hair and added a hint of colour to the top of her hair where it was not as bright.

I did some minor fixes as a shade near lips and eyebrows which I previously missed.

I removed most distractive strands of hair going horizontally.

I spent 20 minutes cleaning the tiny grains of sand from Kely’s skirt (not much visible in this resolution, sorry). I also removed the most significant folds on the skirt. Yep, ironing would have helped.

And finally, I added some sharpening to her face, various colour gradients to create the shine and glow effect and some extra mist here and there.

The last step, I gave it a bit of a ‘pop’.

I suspect that you probably can’t see much of a difference between the individual photos. There are two main reasons:

The resolution - the full resolution of this photo allows you to comfortably print it in about 40x60 cm. So of course I had to deal with many more details than visible in a tiny preview of the photo.

The changes are subtle. And there are literally hundreds of them. That is what makes the difference between fast (highly automatic) edit and a high-quality one. It gives a very natural-looking result, but all the distractions are gone and all the focus is on Kely.

Check the slider below to see all the tiny changes together. You will see a huge difference!