Crush on Fix-It-Fridays

The snowfall has canceled many a plan today which gives me the perfect excuse to play around with an i heart faces Fix It Friday photo. Every friday, a contributing photographer's image is posted and the rest of us get to play with it in our digital darkrooms. This is my first attempt at at Fix-It Friday image. You can show off your before and afters, learn from others, and provide step-by-step instruction to help teach and inspire other photogs.
Here is the original shot by Michelle Johnson...

here is my color attempt...

Michelle's OOC (Out Of Camera) shot looked a little blue (cyan) to me...added a little yellow using the color balance tool in Photoshop CS4.  Seeing them together, perhaps mine is too yellow now? I blurred out the background using the Gaussian blur tool. Darkened the image overall using Levels. And went back into areas on the face that were bright and darkened them a little more.  

and my black and white edit...

When I work with black and white---I return to my film darkroom roots using the channel mixer tool. Play with removing red, blue, green tones and having fun.  I LOVE a very contrasty black and white shot.  Once I have the general contrast down, I use the burn and dodge method to fine tune it. This image has a filter of almost vanished sepia on it.  I also cloned out the branch that ran through the center of the image--a little distracting. 

My big confession---I don't use layers. I don't know how. My Photoshop knowledge is pretty basic. I have been playing with some textures lately and stumbled on the overlay tool. More accurately, I stumbled around while following one of Jodi of MCP ACTIONS tutorials. She is amazing and if you are techtarded like me, you'll form a crush on her classes too.

Head on over to i heart faces and try your hand at this week's edit.