A little Valentine's card

Little girl dressed in ballerina clothes, wearing fairy wings, letting monkey out of the bird cage. What's not to like?!

Credits: Flergs sockmonkey freebie background paper and monkey  from www.flergalicious.com, great stuff! Photo by moi

Legend - A bit of sunshine

Last autumn I had a portrait session with R, who very kindly spent a couple of hours posing for me as part of her CAS programme for her IB diploma course. It was a beautiful afternoon, and we went to the compound next to Dulwich College. The gingkoes were mellow gold and the maples had turned rich, burnt copper. The sun was reflecting on the artificial lake, and the light was warm and kind. We had a good laugh! 

In the image above I was trying the camera settings, we were not quite ready yet. The image below had the same sort of natural, golden light, created by the sun bouncing on the lake. I wanted to give it a rich look, with an  elegant feel, so I applied a split-toning preset in Lightroom, then adjusted contrast with the tone curve panel. Once I got the tones I wanted to show off R's beautiful features and dress, I opened the image in PS CS6 and I blended the image with a background paper (Giving, black paper) from Summer Driggs here. I had to change the colour first with a hue/saturation layer mask, then I changed the blending mode to overlay and adjusted opacity accordingly. Finally I applied another mask to erase the texture from R's face and dress.