Excercise: Improvement or interpretation?

The direct equivalent of this process is called dodging/burning which are terms for what used to happen in the dark room. Few people in the days of film considered this anything but legitimate processing. The effect depends on how extreme an adjustment is made to that selection and what kind of adjustment. I think that this sort of adjustment is acceptable compared to the sort of adjustments that are based on deception, this is a very innocent and harmless 'deception' in my mind. The area of adjustment that isn't acceptable in my opinion is that where reputation and business is affected in a negative way or by the same token affected in a deceptive way intended to deceive the innocent for example the systematic 'enhancing' of models in magazines aimed at a younger market who may be affected.

For this exercise I needed to start with a portrait in a setting, and then use a manual selection method to select just the area of the person. The two most usual methods for this are the lasso tool, with which I can draw an outline, or mask painting with a brush. The image I chose for this exercise is of a friend who had mentioned to me after seeing her picture, 'I wish I'd coloured my hair!', so I thought this an ideal opportunity to fulfil her wish.

I commenced using Lightroom, and without prior experience in this sort of adjustment found it really difficult to find the tools I needed. I consulted my Photoshop Lightroom 3 book, which didn't really point me in the right direction other than spot correction. The recommendation seemed to be to open the image in photoshop, I also have a book on PSE but seem to get on better just playing with the software and working it out for myself, on this occasion though I drew a blank. UTube is such a great source of information, I searched for changing hair colour in photo-shop and after viewing a couple, one of which used hue saturation to lighten the hair after spending hours selecting every hair! I did find one though that suited this exercise and as a result managed to find the dodge and burn buttons and proceeded on to change my friend's hair colour, bearing in mind I'd not done this before......it turned out like this:

 

I'm not really sure what she would think of it as the colour is a little dark for her but as an exercise it seems to have worked and I have figured out how to enhance images.