Friday, January 17, 2014

CoffeeShop Sweet Baby Dreams B&W Photoshop/PSE Action!


Today I am posting my new favorite B&W baby action, called Sweet Baby Dreams B&W (thanks for your name suggestions!).  This action is the perfect B&W edit for baby images on light backgrounds.  Sweet Baby Dreams makes your image B&W and automatically smooths skin, fades backgrounds/blankets, defines eyes/hair, adds an optional ivory tint, and brightens skin.  Best of all, this action is fully adjustable and can be run on a SOOC (straight-out-of-camera) photo.



Here is a "before" and "after" using Sweet Baby Dreams by Candice of Birth and Life Photography.  What an adorable little sleeping angel!

Within the next week I plan on posting a similar version that is specific for babies on dark backgrounds.  I just need to figure out a name for that one.

I will also post a step-by-step Action UnWrapped Tutorial for this edit in the next few days so you can see what is going on "under the hood" and learn some new editing tips.

CoffeeShop Sweet Baby Dreams B&W Photoshop/PSE Action Tutorial:



1. Open a baby image with a light background. I used a beautiful image from Adia Speer Photography (Facebook) in this edit.




2.  Levels Adjustment:  Start the action.  A Levels adjustment layer will pop up allowing you to make any needed contrast adjustments.  I usually slide up the mid-tones a bit.


2.  Skin Smoothing:  Use the eyedropper to click on a clean area of skin and adjust the Fuzziness slider until only the skin is clearly selected.


Move the Radius slider to apply softness to the skin in the Surface Blur pane.  You can overdo it at this point as you can lower the opacity of the skin smoothing layer and/or paint on the layer mask.


3.  After the action finishes running, adjust the opacity of each layer to taste.  I made no changes to the layers on this edit other than remove some of the Skin Smooth layer from her headband.  Sometimes I adjust the opacities of the Boost layer and Color  Tint layer.



Here she is, isn't she beautiful!  I love this type of sweet B&W edit on the little ones.

Download the CoffeeShop Sweet Baby Dreams B&W action!  You can also download it here.

Do you want to download my favorite CoffeeShop PSE/Photoshop Actions and Lightroom Presets or Design Elements in one convenient zipped file AND help support this blog? Just click here for my action pack or here for a download of some of my most popular design elements, storyboards, and textures.

For complete info on installing all of my actions, click here.

5 comments:

  1. I can't wait to try this- looks beautiful! Thank you!

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  2. So excited to use this, thank you Rita! :)

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  3. Thank you so much for all your beautiful actions and tutorials Rita. Absolutely stunning! I've used only your actions in my Photo-Editing Challenge this week to show how beautiful they are and what can be done. :D

    http://sonelscornerphotochallenge.wordpress.com/2014/01/20/photo-editing-challenge-unusual-angles/

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  4. Thank you for creating beautiful actions and making them available to everyone. I cannot even begin to tell you how much these have helped me.

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Thank you for taking the time to leave a message, I love reading them! All comments are personally moderated by me and I will post and answer them them as soon as possible.
Rita