This piece is of four sisters with their dollies lined up in front of their garage in Grand Rapids, Michigan in 1954.  The beauty in yellow recently turned 75 and her children contacted me to bring some color to a family favorite photo for the birthday girl.

Each of the girls has a favorite color and their kids thought it would be cool for the girls' coats to represent their favorites.  To this day, each wears her signature color often and when buying gifts, they tend to follow the color pattern as well.

I had never done a project like this before, so it was a golden opportunity to learn some new tricks!  My tool of choice for this one was Adobe Lightroom. I learned about the importance of masks when adding custom colors to photos. The iPad and Apple Pencil were the right hardware for the job as well. 

This is one of the first drafts I sent for approval. I was pleased with how the coats popped, but the green one was giving me trouble.  The coat just didn't have enough color in it, so we opted to include the skirt as well. That adjustment definitely helped with the color balance for each person. 

We also decided that the colors were a little hot. Easy fix! The masks in Lightroom allowed me to isolate each person and mute the colors so the piece feels more like a memory than a movie poster.

The last step was to make sure the canvas looked the way it needed to. We ended up with one 8x10 and several 5x7's.  I learned a great deal with this project and I'm so thankful that I was able to make this photo into the custom canvas art piece that this family had in mind.