Friday, March 26, 2010

Working With Textures

If you have Photoshop and you aren't working with textures, then you should be. They are a great element to add to your pictures for an extra "kick".

Shadow House Creations has some great textures and tutorials on how to use them. The best part? They're all free!

Check out these two pictures.

The first has been edited, but textures have not yet been applied.



In the second picture I used Shadow House Creation's textures and this tutorial to make this picture.



Check out the rest of Shadow House Creation's blog here.

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

What a Little Lighting Can Do

In all honesty, I edit almost ALL of my photos. Rarely is there a photo that I take that I don't think can be helped in some way by post-processing. Sometimes that little extra something is to adjust lighting levels or bumping up saturation to bring colors out. Sometimes it's using actions and textures to give it a whole new look.

Today I'm going to show you the same photograph, one SOOC (Straight Out of the Camera) and one that has only had the lighting levels adjusted.

The Original:



After Adjustments:



Basically my lighting trick is one I got from Scott Kelby's book about Photoshop Elements. You use CTRL-L, use the eyedroppers to choose the darkest, lightest and midtone gray colors and it adjusts for you. There's a few other details about setting up the default colors for each dropper, but if you really want to know them, just email me.



Friday, March 12, 2010

Fix-It Friday

I missed Fix-It Friday last week, so I was eager to participate this week.




I found this week's picture a little hard to edit, but I gave it my best shot!

The Original:


Fix Number 1:



What I Did: First I adjusted the levels, adjust the saturation, used Coffee, Tea, Photographys Little Perk action, screened the image and adjusted the opacity to my liking, then applied CTP Perfect Portrait Action.

Fix Number 2:



What I did: All of the above in slightly different order and then at the end added an additional CTP Sunkissed Action.