Touch-Up Tuesday - Kristin on the Beach

I know I keep posting pictures from my Beach Photo Shoot but I can't help it.  I love them and I haven't had a chance to shoot recently.  (Tho I have another friend who's volunteering to let me practice portrait photography on her and I'm VERY excited about it--but more on that later!)

Here's one of my favorite shots I took of Kristin on my photo shoot last week, straight out of camera.

I actually like the picture a lot straight out of camera. But here's what I did to edit it:
-I cropped the picture.
-I zoomed in on her face and used the healing brush tool to remove the strands of hair across her face and eyes.
-I added a high pass filter at 10 pixels on a separate layer and used the "overlay" blending mode to combine.
-I adjusted brightness, contrast, and saturation to taste.
-I felt the high pass filter was a little too harsh on her face, so on a separate layer I added a small amount of surface blur and erased the added blur on her eyes, mouth, and hair.
-Then I used the magnetic lasso to outline her eyes, one at a time and feathered my selection by 5 pixels. Then I used the unsharp mask on her eyes to really make them pop.

And that brought me to this!

I really liked the picture SOOC, but I think the edit pops more! Then, just to go a step further, I used Pioneer Woman's B&W Beauty action to convert the picture to black and white. Then I used coffee shops soulful black and white action "charming" to add just a slight amount of tint. I lowered the opacity of the charming layer to 20% which makes the tint VERY subtle, but I like what it adds to the picture!

What do you think of the edits? Here they all are together. It helps having such a lovely model!




UPDATE:

Faith over at Simplicity suggested that my high pass filter might be a little too strong.  Honestly, this is one of my first times trying to edit with high pass, so I really appreciate the feedback!  I tried the edit again with the high pass filter down to 5 pixels instead of 10 and did all the other edits listed above the same.  i think it made it a bit less "harsh."

Its a subtle difference, but I think its a little better this way, so thanks for the suggestion!