Welcome to the 17th week of Shoot and Edit: Part 2. Click HERE for all the details and upcoming prompts/themes (also including previous editing tutorials).
This week’s theme or prompt was to show us one “Growth” SOOC shot (this was just a suggestion, you can show us any SOOC shot). Hopefully you linked up with Jill’s blog earlier this week.
Each Thursday, I will take my SOOC shot and provide some basic editing tips (I will try to keep it basic and work my way up). You can then try these tips on your own photos and link up here – linky will now open EARLY on Thursdays and be open THROUGH SUNDAY. If you’d prefer, can simply share your own edit and show us what you did to achieve the look. We want this challenge to be a learning experience, so feel free to teach us something new too! Also, it does not matter what editing program you use. Although I tend to work within Adobe CS5 (Photoshop), Photoshop Elements and Adobe Camera Raw…it does not mean that you have to use the exact same program. I hope you’ll be able to take the concepts and apply them in the program you feel most comfortable using.
Once again, here is my SOOC shot:
I tried really hard this week to teach a new lesson this week…maybe talk about gradient maps or something of that nature. However, when I started working with the image, it really needed little more than a few subtle processing adjustments in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR).
Considering what we learned in last week’s lesson, I opened my photo in ACR and started working within the tabs (advanced feature for ACR attached to CS5) to make adjustments – no presets, just using my eye to adjust the image to my liking. I did not make screen shots of my edit this week – mostly because this is a review of last week. Again, if you missed last week’s lesson, CLICK HERE. Here’s my ACR edit:
If you’re working in Photoshop Elements, you may not have the same advanced features that I have…but, you can still go into Elements and work with your curves and levels to get a nice clean edit!
Like I mentioned earlier, once I opened the image in Photoshop, I was really hoping to do something different for the sake of the tutorial. At this point in the game though, I think we’re all finding that nothing beats a clean processing. With that said, I made a few small enhancements beyond the ACR edit:
- Duplicate layer – Reduce Noise – Merge Layers
- Duplicate layer – High Pass Filter – Soft Light Blending Mode
- Brightness/Contrast adjustment layer – brightness (12)/contrast (6) – Merge Layers
- Duplicate Layer – Soft Light blending mode at 20% opacity
- Duplicate Layer – Screen blending mode at 20% opacity just on main focal point (using layer mask)
- Merge Layers – Watermark – Resize – Sharpen
I hope you all have a great Thursday and I look forward to seeing your edits!
