Anatomy of...Queenie

I just recently had the pleasure of taking some photos of one of my lifelong, bestest girlfriends ever, Queenie.


Queenie embodies the epitome of professionalism...always wearing a suit or business attire and perfectly put together.  She didn't even own a pair of jeans until about a year ago!  She told me she was in need of some new professional images for her Image Consulting site so I agreed to do her photos...on one condition:  that she let me take some "fun" photos of her when the pro ones were finished.  She agreed, thinking the whole time that she wasn't going to have to leave her precious suit:)  


I finally managed to talk her out of the suit and into a pretty little sundress.  She almost had a nervous breakdown walking from the changing room to the woods...even turned around once and said she just couldn't do it, she was craving the safety of her professional clothes!  Of course she didn't win that battle and finally...after seeing the finished results...admitted that the sundress was worth it after all~


Here's what Queenie looks like when she wakes up in the morning...

Yes, she's gorgeous and impressive but I was wanting to show something...more ~

Here's a very simple edit that I performed on one of her pics...

I opened my original in photoshop elements 6 for mac:

Next I cropped the photo and softened the skin using Coffeeshop Baby PowderRoom.  

After that I wanted to add a little more color to her eyes since I knew I was going to be fading the color in the final version...so I lassoed the eyes and went to Enhance - Adjust Color - Color Variations and increased the green.

Next, as usual, I added some textures then erased them partially, but not entirely, from her face...

Then I ran one of my super favorite actions, Pioneer Woman Seventies and lowered the opacity to 67%...

Then I noticed that her hair was a little flyaway on the right side so I did some cloning and cloned over it ...it looked like this before I cloned it...

...and this afterwards, which I thought looked a little too perfect...

So I added a layer mask and brought back in some of the flyaways for a more natural look...

What do you think...would you have fixed the hair?   

Here's my final...

Waaaaay better than a suit!!

Here's a few more from her shoot...she's never had photos like this before~

There were so many fabulous shots from this session....of course I've got a dramatic one that I'll show the edit on soon...stay tuned!