Thursday, January 01, 2015

CoffeeShop "Creamy Luxe" Photoshop/PSE Action and Tutorial!


Happy New Year!  We had a less-than-exciting evening last night.  We are all sick with a yucky virus.  My husband and the boys had purchased fireworks but we decided not to set them off because it was cold and the boys have really horrible coughs.  So we watched a movie and had popcorn, put the kids to bed at 9:30, stayed up and watched some Amazon Prime until 12, kissed passionately (ok, perhaps it was a little love-peck, but if we had been feeling better our kiss could have been featured on a Lifetime movie), and went to sleep.

I hope your evening was more exciting than our evening.  ;-)

This morning the boys are slowly and loudly hacking up their lungs so I decided to give myself a noise break and come upstairs and finish up my newest action,"Creamy Luxe".  I love the last action I created, "Rainbow Velvet Luxe" and decided to use it as a base for this new action.  There are a few changes (different color tints and no rainbow) and I especially love how this effect looks on winter portraits.

I used a gorgeous image from Jill Wellington Photography in this action tutorial.

I also added a sunburst overlay and I will show you how I did that below.  I was going to create some new ones for you, but when I was googling tutorials on designing them I found this incredible tutorial video which included three free starburst overlays you can download!  When I get time I will try to make some of my own, but for now you should go and grab the ones there, they are really nice.


CoffeeShop "Creamy Luxe" Photoshop/PSE Action Tutorial:


1.  Open your image.  This action looks lovely on all types of portraits, but I really love using it on winter ones like this beautiful image from Jill Wellington.


2.  Run the action. This is what the image looks like without any changes.  I am going to paint on the layer masks and adjust opacities.  The action already applies an automatic mask, but you might have to tweak it a bit for your own image.

Click "B" to grab your brush (make sure it is a normal brush), then "D" to set your foreground black and background white.  Click "X" to switch between a black and white brush.


3.  I started on the "Creamy" layer.  I upped the opacity to 63% and removed some of that layer off the snow with a soft black low opacity brush. I also painted it off her eyes.


4.  I clicked on the "Luxe" layer's mask and used a black soft 100% opacity brush to remove that layer completely from the little girl and the snow.  I then switched to a soft 100% opacity white brush and painted over the fence.  I didn't change the opacity of that layer.


5.  I  clicked on "Rosy Lips and Cheeks" layer's mask and used a soft low opacity white brush to gently brush back in her rosy cheeks. The "Creamy" layer covered them up.


6.  I opened the Starburst 1 overlay and dragged it on top of my image,  under the "Creamy" layer.


7.  I Ctrl-T (free-transformed) the overlay to fit (if you can't see the bars to drag it, Ctrl-0 (zero) to zoom in and out).


8. I put the overlay layer in Screen blending mode and then desaturated it with shift/cmd/U (I didn't want the golden color this time).  I am finished!


I am really happy with the final edit.  I would love to see your before and afters using this action.  Please post them on my Facebook page!!!

Download the CoffeeShop "Creamy Luxe" Photoshop/PSE Action.


Do you want to download thousands of professional CoffeeShop PSE/Photoshop actions (including exclusive ones not found anywhere for free), textures/overlays, scrapbooking papers, clip art/design elements, photo storyboards and frames, and Lightroom presets from this site in one convenient zipped file AND help support this one-woman blog?

Just click here for my CoffeeShop Mega Download Pack!

3 comments:

  1. Just downloaded and used on a couple photos I took of my daughter today. THANK YOU! I just LOVE LOVE LOVE the effect! It's the first PS action I have ever used and I think I'm in love. :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hello Ms. Rita!

    I just want to thank you for your blog, I find it very very helpful and inspiring, I want to thank you for your awesome work, and mostly i want to say thank you because you are willing to share your work with everybody. :)

    ReplyDelete

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Rita