Fix it Friday: Photoshop Tips (Part 1)

I figured I'd combine my fix-it Friday for I Heart Faces with some of the tips/tricks I learned at the Photoshop seminar this week (disclaimer: Jayci wont sleep or entertain herself for anything this week, so my brain is a little fried. Apologies if this don't make no sense).

But then I SAW this week's Fix-it, and it might be a little out of my league. But oh well. Here it is anyways. By the way, I adore Catherine's photography and felt totally encouraged that she sometimes forgets to change her settings too :-)
Original:Here's my first/original fixes just using a quick tip I learned this week at the seminar:
Basically the tip the teacher showed us was to go into channels to make some of your edits. The red channel also contains all the contrast info, so any changes to contrast you make there will be way more effective than applying it to the whole picture. The green channel contains all the details, so that's where you want to do your sharpening for maximum effect. And the blue channel contains all the 'garbage' (the noise) so that's where you want to run your "despeckle" and reduce noise etc.

So after the basic fixes (which literally took like 2 seconds) I played a little to get a few more looks:

This is my favorite one I think. Now if only I remembered what I did to it . . . Aren't I helpful?Cropped. Converted to black and white using Boutwell's actions and then brightened to achieve high key look. Cropped, ran 'antiqued brown action' (which I actually found via Catherine's blog)Today is turning into "one of those days," you know the kind: where no matter what you do, you just can't win. So after going like 3 rounds with Jayci, I'm tapping out . . . I'll post some more tips/photoshop insight this weekend for you!