Edit Me Challenge: Baby Portrait

It has been a while since I joined in the Edit Me challenge.  If you are unfamiliar with it, My Reflection of Something shares a photo that one of her guest judges has taken.  You download it and edit it any way you want.  So you can use whatever program you want to.  Just have fun.  You can edit it to reflect your style or you can edit it the way you think would compliment the photo the most.

Here is the photo taken by Kala at The Wishful Lamb.

Instead of just telling you what I did and you get lost in words, I am going to show you the steps so you can see the difference along the way.  First I adjusted the color.  It was a little too cool (blue) for me.  So I warmed up the hues.  So it looked like this…

Then I used a very, very cool action from my favorite, Paint the Moon, called Make My Skin Perfect.  It is available in the Miracle Makeover Set.  I adjusted the opacity to 40% because I want the skin to look smooth, but not fakey.  So now there is smoother skin like this…

Then I ran Paint the Moon’s Shy (from the Moxie set) at 95% opacity overall.  Inside the action there are many individual layers.  I did a layer mask on the Brighten & Tone layer over the blanket.  Here is the result…

It just didn’t seemed finished.  I decided to add a texture.  I don’t know if I am particularly happy with this final version, but I am happier than the other 20 something I also tried.  I just don’t think I used the best texture for it.  I used Kim Klassen’s Just Stitched texture below.  I did the same texture in two different layers.  One with Soft Light blend mode at 100% (layer mask over the baby), and the other layer with Multiply blend mode at 21% (with a layer mask over the baby).

So my absolute final version of this photo that Kala at The Wishful Lamb took is this…

Here is the original again.

Go to My Reflection of Something and get the photo and take a crack at it yourself.  I think you will find it a lot of fun.  Go on, try it.  You know you want to.