Blue Eyes

Yesterday we went to the park. It was 5o degrees in Lewiston -- beautiful weather for this time of year. My camera tagged along. I found some blue eyes peeking out at me. Walter's eyes have changed from blue to bluish-green with gold flecks. I think they may turn more green as he ages. Who knows?

These eyes are gorgeous. I have no idea who they belong to. A nameless boy -- nameless to me at least. He kept looking out the peep hole at me. I think he wanted his picture taken. I am not in the habit of taking pictures of other people's children without asking (friends aside). But his eyes were begging to be photographed. I snapped two quick pictures. It made him happy (it made me happy, too). Above is the original photo, no editing except my stamp. Doesn't he have beautiful eyes and skin?

Here is the picture with a little editing in Photoshop Elements 7. First I cropped the image and cloned out the piece of dog/cat hair on his hat. Then I made 2 copies of the background layer and set one copy to overlay, and the other to screen -- and adjusted each layer opacity to taste. Then I selected the blue part of his eyes and made a brightness/contrast layer. I upped the brightness and contrast just a tiny bit -- his eyes were so pretty already. Then I ran the unsharp mask, added my stamp, and resized the image. The only difference between this photo and the one below is that I blurred the heavy texture of the playground equipment just little bit with a gaussian blur -- it was bugging me.

Ah...... the wonders of Photoshop......and I'm sure I know only a tenth of it.

PS-- I bought my first photography book, The Digital Photography Book by Scott Kelby. He's a funny guy. I'm learning lots.