Q&A Tuesday: Light & Airy Images - Part II (The Artistic Edit)

How to do an artistic edit on photoshop On instagram, a photographer asked me how I accomplished this edit, so I'll go over it briefly. Unfortunately this is not really a beginner level tutorial. However, if you're comfortable with photoshop, this tutorial should be fairly straight forward for you.

***********Photshop Tutorial***********

1) The first step I took was I adjusted everything in Adobe Lightroom. It's a software you can purchase for around $150, and it is so comprehensive and incredibly powerful. Once I discovered how to use it, I started to do most of my editing there. In the "Before" photo, you can see my LR edit. I can't exactly explain everything I did in LR because I would take a really long time, but I'm working on putting together a Film and Fashion LR preset coming out in the spring, and it'll just be a one click thing. I'm super excited about it, and I'll keep you updated via the blog.2) Once I imported the photo from LR into Photoshop, I lighten the background, by creating a Solid Color layer > fill it with a light (almost whitish) pinkish peach color.3) Layer Mode: Overlay > Adjust Opacity to around 19%.4) Create Hue/Saturation layer> Select Yellow channel, and turn down saturation by -59. Masked out the background. Leaving the yellow in the background, but not on her skin.5) Mask out face skin, hair, and parts of clothing. (If you're not familiar with masking, check out this tutorial I did on skin.)6) Add another Solid color layer > fill with white > Layer Mode "Screen" > Opacity at 34% > Mask out the skin, hair, and clothing again. (This step really lightens the background)7) The next step is a Curves layer, and I adjusted the colors within all three Red, Green, and Blue channel to give the shadows a purplish look.8) Final step is another Curves layer on the RBG channel to pop the contrast. Slight S-curve will do.

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However, it really doesn't need to be complex. I like my artistic edit, but the Lightroom only edit is fine too. Most of the session, as you can see with the photos below are done with the LR preset that I'm developing. The only part of the process I heavily use photoshop for is to retouch and smooth out skin, and for when I want to go crazy on a photo. :) houston engagement and bridal at tiny boxwoods