How I Edit My Photos, Instructions. (Using FREE Actions.)

[Camilla and Darwin]

I get a lot of questions about how I edit my photos, or just how my photos look so vibrant. I thought I'd put together this discussion to show you guys how to edit your photos easily and quickly. 

First off, I use photoshop actions. Photoshop actions are editing options you can select and push "play" on, that will do a whole bunch of adjustments automatically. They cut time down, and makes things extremely easy. These are the actions I use, and they are free. They are from the Pioneer Woman and she has both photoshop and elements actions available. 

Photoshop actions: 

http://thepioneerwoman.com/photography/2010/03/actions-update-2/

Photoshop Elements actions: 

http://thepioneerwoman.com/photography/2010/03/pioneer-woman-action...

So, here is my photo editing process on a portrait, using only the actions from the pioneer woman. Usually I will do additional things, such as skin smoothing or sharpening. But these are adequate when you want to do a photo quickly. This whole process took me about 1 minute. 

When you install action sets, they will be in a sidebar in the toolbar. You select the action you want then press the "play" button. You can then adjust the opacity in the layers section.

First, here is my original image, a portrait of my sister Naomi. (she's so cute isn't she.) As you can see it's pretty dark and not colorful. 

The first step is to use the "bring on the eyes action" this will create a new layer and all you have to do is choose your brush size and paint over the area of the eye you want boosted. Usually I will paint the eye (not the whites, just the iris and pupil) at 100% opacity then adjust it downwards until it looks normal. after I've painted it on. I usually end up leaving it at about 45% opacity.

Before and after "bring on the eyes" as you can see her eyes are more bright now.

Next I will use the "boost" action and the "slight lighten" action. You will lower the opacity in these as well, until it looks good to you. For this I used 100% boost opacity and about 60% lighten. Such a difference!

Finally, select the "warmer" and set it at about 30% opacity, to bring some warmer tones to the photo. Then I went to image>adjustments>vibrance and nudged the vibrance slider up a little. If you don't have a vibrance function you can use Image>adjustments>hue/saturation, slide the saturation up a little bit. 

The original and the finished image

And I wanted this to be in black-and-white, so I used the "black and white beauty" action set.

I hope this was helpful, and I would say to anyone who has photoshop or elements, try it! It makes editing very simple. 

[Jean, Rylee and Cooper]

Beautiful!

[Ann Kendig]

Very nice Carla, you mentioned work flow when I first began to learn Aperture (Apple editing software) I bought a book with companion CD and the author started talking about work flow and I thought I do not need any work flows but after editing a bunch of photos I started thinking yeah work flow how can I improve mine. Aperture has a nice flow to it since it is primarily targeting photo editing and I am sure Lightroom does as well which is one advantage over Photoshop which can do everything under the sun but has a tougher learning curve. Mike

[Dos Doodles--Sam & Luke]

I love you, Camilla.  'Nuff said.