Happy New Year!!!! If you have been waiting to order a gallery wrapped canvas, now might be the time to finally get it done! Color Inc has them for 50% off until Friday morning. Click to go to their site! I love using Color Inc.
So what do you think about Adobe making Photoshop only available now if you pay a monthly/annual fee to "rent" it? Personally, I am not incredibly happy about this change since I don't purchase every upgrade and usually use my editing programs for years. I would prefer if they sold the program AND gave you the option to rent it. Or a rent-to-own program would also work. I have read the pros and cons and I think I will wait until I have to upgrade my CS5.
One change that will not surprise me is if more photographers start purchasing LR and PSE
rather than dealing with renting Photoshop. LR and PSE are a power couple and most people won't even need Photoshop unless they want to write actions. I have to have PSE or Photoshop because I love to add textures and use layers, so I am happy that PSE is still so affordable AND can be purchased. That is why I am really excited that my actions work in both Photoshop and PSE. Not only that, many of my actions "unlock" things in PSE that you usually only can use in Photoshop. For example, quite a few of my actions allow you to use Curves in PSE.BTW, I just noticed that PSE is on sale today!
I would love for you to leave a comment on whether you are going to rent Photoshop, stick with your older version of Photoshop for now, or simply use PSE. I am also going to also start posting more Lightroom presets and tutorials and digital design elements, so I hope to cover everyone. :-) And if you get a chance, please leave a comment on this post about what you would personally like to see me post on my blog.
Today I want to introduce my newest portrait retouching action, CoffeeShop Sweet Dreams. This action is especially lovely on baby portraits, and allows you to adjust contrast by Curves and then automatically soften skin while adding an adjustable soft tint. This is a simple but sweet action for those times you want to do a quick edit.
CoffeeShop Sweet Dreams Tutorial:
This beautiful SOOC image is from Adia Speer Photography (Facebook). Before running the action I want to fix the top of the blanket and also remove some of the baby's flaky skin.
I grabbed the Marquee tool (M) and selected the blanket area as seen above.
Ctrl-T (Free Transform) and pull up the top of the blanket. There are many ways to fix this, but this way is quick.
As you can see there is some flaky skin on her hands. I personally love some baby skin imperfections in my portraits, but I do like to remove excess flaky skin. There are many ways to remove it, but I usually just grab my Cloning tool (S) on normal, soft brush, 100% and sample areas of clean skin and paint over flaky areas.
This was a quick cloning job, but I am pretty happy with it.
Skin is fixed and time to run the action.
The first prompt will be a curves adjustment layer. I already pulled up the mid tones a bit, but you can play around with the curve until your portrait is properly exposed. This action allows PSE users access to the valuable Curves tool.
Next you will select the skin on your baby so you can add optional skin smoothing. Click on the skin and adjust the fuzziness to taste.
Now adjust the Radius pixels to add some skin softening. You can overdo it at this point and then lower the opacity of that layer or paint out excess skin smoothing using a soft black brush on the layer mask. I always like to point out that you shouldn't overdo the skin smoothing step and make your baby look like a plastic doll. :-)
This is the finished image after the action finishes. Adjust the opacity of the Sweet Baby layer to taste and you are done! This one is shown at 100%. I really like the dreamy softness of this edit.
Download the free CoffeeShop Sweet Dreams action. You can also download it here!
Do you want to download my favorite CoffeeShop PSE/Photoshop Actions (including this one!) 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. Photoshop and PSE11-12 users even have the option of loading all of the actions in one simple group!
For complete info on installing all of my actions, click here.
