I’m not sure what has inspired this overwhelming feeling of joy and creativity lately, but I’m going to blame it on Kim Klassen. I signed up for her PSE skinny mini e-course a couple of weeks ago thinking I might not learn anything new, but that I could at least reinforce some of her lessons though my tutorials. As it turns out, I’ve learned a couple of new tricks and I’ve been inspired to change up my processing. Here is a nearly SOOC shot (I overexposed it on purpose and recovered some of the blacks in Adobe Camera Raw).
Using some of Kim’s processing steps, I ran a clean (and manual – no actions) edit. It includes a high pass filter-soft light layer (this is an Ashley step), a levels adjustment, hue/saturation adjustment and warming filter. If you’d like a more complete layout of my workflow, look at the first few steps of my textured edit below (everything before I start adding texture).
Then, I wanted to run my own black and white conversion – again, no actions. After creating a duplicate copy of my background layer, I used PSE’s black and white converter (Go to Image>Convert to Black and White). The tool suggests several types of conversion…I selected scenic landscape. At this point, I made a few adjustments to customize the conversion to my taste:
- Background Copy – High Pass Filter @ 40 pixels – Soft Light blending Mode – 40% opacity
- Levels Adjustment – 25, 1.20, 255 – 100% opacity
- Brightness/Contrast Adjustment Layer: +9 Contrast – 100% opacity
- Warming Filter (85) @ 40% – Soft Light blending mode – 72% opacity
For more black and white photos, go to:
At this point, I wanted to walk through a Kim Klassen-inspired texture edit. To be honest, this isn’t a huge stretch from my typical processing, however, I’ve learned that I don’t need multiple textures to create a textured look. Rather, I can use one texture using a few different blending modes to create a unique look. If you’re wondering how I choose a blending mode…it’s an experiment. Here are my layers:
- Background Copy – High Pass Filter @ 40 pixels – Soft Light blending Mode – 40% opacity
- Levels Adjustment – 40, 1.45, 248 – 100% opacity
- Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer: +10 saturation, -35 yellow, -15 green
- Warming Filter (85) @ 13% – Soft Light blending mode – 25% opacity
- Kim Klassen Wet Tile texture – Multiply blending mode – 25% opacity
- Kim Klassen Wet Tile texture – Soft Light blending mode – 52% opacity
- Kim Klassen Wet Tile texture – Color Burn blending mode – 10% opacity
- Background Copy – Screen blending mode – 10% opacity
- Brightness/Contrast: Brightness +2, Contrast +20
- Color Fill (pink/cream) layer – Linear Dodge – 14% opacity
I’m really liking the way my textured edit turned out…I think it’s a little softer than my typical textured edits. Which edit do you prefer?
With all that said, check out some of the other blogs I’m linking up with today.

Can you tell that I have a problem being wordless? Nonetheless, I hope you enjoyed my photo processing experiment. Be sure to come back tomorrow for a very special giveaway. I hope you’re as excited as I am! Have an awesome Wednesday.
With all that said, check out some of the other blogs I’m linking up with today.


Can you tell that I have a problem being wordless? Nonetheless, I hope you enjoyed my photo processing experiment. Be sure to come back tomorrow for a very special giveaway. I hope you’re as excited as I am! Have an awesome Wednesday.
