Well, I did it again. About a year ago, I photoshopped pictures of Elliott and Neela just for kicks. I was trying to pull off the look that keeps popping up in magazines. It turned out pretty good. I was bored, so I tried it again with a picture of Roland:

Compared to original:
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This time, I actually kept track of what I did. Read the rest to see an actual tutorial.

I took this photo myself and I love it. Roland was blowing bubbles and I caught him just as he was puckering up. It was also taken during the day, so you can see his eye color very clearly (which is still blue at six months). Anyway, something about it screamed, “Clean me up!”

I made two duplicates of the image, creating 3 identical layers. On the bottom layer, I adjusted the Exposure by -0.6. On the top layer, I increased the Exposure by 0.6.

Lower Exposure:

Higher Exposure:

This is a cheaters way of creating what’s called an HDR image. I use the higher exposure to brighten shadows and the lower exposure to flatten highlights. Using Layer Masks, I eliminate the appropriate areas. For this image, I left the background darker and brought out Roland’s face with the higher exposure.

It looked like this when I was done (and it’s what makes Roland look like he’s glowing):

Already, Roland is starting to pop out from the background.

Next, I combined the three layers to create a forth layer on top. I created a basic, ovular marquee around Roland’s face. I added a huge, 100 pixel Feather and inverted the selection (so everything except Roland was selected). With the background selected, I created a fairly dramatic Gaussian Blur.

Using a Layer Mask again, I removed any blurriness from Roland’s face and from the upper part of his shirt. Specifically, I wanted to be able to clearly see wispy hairs and his shirt collar while leaving the background (and other unimportant elements) blurred.

There we go. Now he’s really starting to pop out.

Here comes the fun part. I increased the contrast just a bit to bring out the color. I used the Unsharp Mask on Roland’s face to add more focus. I used the Burn tool on his lips to accentuate the puckering. I brightened his eyes and increased the contrast (it should be noted, however, that the color and starburst pattern are his own… if it looks like he’s wearing fake contacts it’s because his eyes are near-perfect). I also brought out the bubbles in his mouth.

Similar to blurring the background, I used a Feathered Marquee to darken the background and corners. I made slight changes in brightness/darkness where it felt appropriate.

Then, I cropped the image much closer to his face, bringing at least a little more in line with the Rule of Thirds.

Finally, I flattened the image and copied it onto itself twice using Overlay. This dramatically adjusts the colors. Using Layer Masks, I completely removed the color effects from Roland’s face.

Which produced the final product:

And there we have it. A Photoshopped Roland. Again, here is a direct comparison between the original and final versions:

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As always, you can download the crazy-high resolution version of this image over at Flickr.

Seriously, how cute is the kid. Right?