Holiday Bokeh - How To

I've been posting some holiday bokeh shots lately, so I thought I'd share what they looked like straight out of camera and how I got to my final picture.  The other day I posted this cute Let it Snow picture.  To set up the shot I put a white piece of poster board on my kitchen floor (its where I had the best light!) and another piece of poster board near it against the wall. I draped the one against the wall with white Christmas lights. I put some fake snow on the ground and placed my cup and some silver beaded garland. Here's what it looked like straight out of camera:

SOOC


Way too dark and way too pink! The first thing I did was adjust the levels and the brightness. Then under hue/saturation I desaturated the colors red and yellow out of the picture.  The next thing that bothered me was the dark cords in between my pretty bokeh circles! I used the healing tool and the clone stamp to remove the cords as much as I could.  Then I brightened the photo even further until the whites finally looked white.

This is what I ended up with!


Quite an improvement.  Of course with my final picture all I could notice when I looked at it was how flat the whipped cream looked! So I took the picture again with fresh whipped cream (and a dash of cinnamon) and did ALL my edits all over again to get this picture!



On this one I also painted in a couple extra bokeh circles in the far right corner because I felt it needed them! I think I need to learn how to manually white balance my camera so it won't take so long to get the colors right in photoshop!