I wanted to walk you through my basic workflow. This shot is from recent photo shoot I did. You can see some of the other photos here.
SOOC:
First I open the photo up in ARC in Elements 8.0.
Here I make my white balance & exposure adjustments. I end up with a photo looking like this.
From here I crop/straighten the photo to my liking. I like close-up pictures so I cropped this one tight and straightened it a tad. When I straighten I try to find a straight line and line it up. I then go to the levels panel {Ctrl+L}. You can see the adjustments I made in the levels window. I usually bump the left arrow to the right some. It brings out the colors more to me.
If I need to do any skin touch ups I usually use baby powder room, regular powder room or glamour glow. Those are all great retouching actions from coffeeshop. If I don’t need to do any skin touch ups I just use Pioneer Woman’s Sharpen This action to sharpen the eyes. This little girl didn’t need any skin touch ups so that is what I did here. I usually do 100 % unless it is too much. Then I will bump down the opacity.
That is all I do for a basic edit for printing.
Now to post it on the web I re-size to 700px wide {yours might be different for your site} and sharpen. I use the unsharp mask for that. First create a duplicate layer {CTRL + J} then go to the Enhance menu, then down to Unsharp Mask. Here are the settings I usually use: Amount: 125%, Radius 1.0 pixels, Threshold 3 levels
I then add my watermark and I am all done.
Hope you enjoyed my tutorial. Feel free to ask me any questions you may have. This was my very first tutorial so let me know if you have any suggestions. Thanks for reading.
Here is the before and after again
You can head on over to Paper Heart Camera for more Touch-Ups
