I Heart Faces - Fix-It Friday

So I'm procrastinating - instead of working on my Italy pictures, I went ahead and made some quick edits on I Heart Faces' Fix It Friday picture. Probably because the original picture is so sweet and I didn't spend but 5 minutes on it (REALLY).

Here is the SOOC shot:

And my edit:

What I did - edits in PSE 6.0
I felt the subjects were a little too dark. In order to selectively lighten them up, I used the Levels adjustment layer. I am sure there are other ways to accomplish the same effect, this just seems to be the fastest for me.

1. I created a Levels adjustment layer, and set the midpoint to 1.5
2. In the Layer mask of the levels adjustment layer, I filled in the white with all black, using the paint bucket tool. This effectively "erases" the Levels adjustment layer.
3. Selected a soft brush, around 100 pixels round, 45% opacity.
4. With the color selection set to white, I lightened up the dark brown shirt and dark details from the two subjects. This reveals the Levels adjustment I had just erased.
5. Cropped the picture to take out some of the blown areas.
6. Flattened the layers.
7. Ran The Pioneer Woman's Soft and Faded Action for PSE. I removed one of the layers (sorry, I don't recall which one).
8. Added Vignette
9. Flattened.

That's it!
Now that I look at it more, I would change the vignette color to match the brown-ish hues in the picture. If only I knew how to do that!

You can check out the other edits at I Heart Faces' Fix-It Friday. Happy editing!