I was recently featured on Las Vegas Photographer – a local blog and online magazine, and decided to share my workflow steps. Well, I made my workflow into a sweet little action. Like I said in the article, I use these techniques on 90% of my images for basic editing. Feel free to download and play with it! And be sure to leave a comment to let me know what you think

Download here: Amy's Workflow (30)

A very simple way to create a watermark brush using Photoshop.

1. Start with a new document: [File--> New] with a width and height of 300 (it doesn’t really matter) and a transparent background.

2. Click on the Text tool, then choose your text. For this example, I used GeoSansLight and Cobalt. Use black for the text, you’ll be able to change it to any color later. If you want a copyright symbol, on a MAC: hold down ALT + G. PC: CTRL + ALT + C

3. When you’re done arranging your text, flatten the image. Layer –>Flatten Image

4. Here’s where you make your brush. Edit –>Define Brush Preset.

5. Name your brush.

6. Click on the Brush tool on your toolbar. Click on the drop down arrow at the top of your screen. This will show you all of your brushes. Your new watermark brush will be at the bottom.

7.  That’s it! You’ve created a watermark brush. Use the bracket keys on your keyboard, [  ], to resize your brush. You can change the color of the watermark by clicking on the color palette. Just “stamp” it on any image to watermark!

A few things; First, I just updated all my galleries with fresh photos. You can view them all right here on the blog – under “Portfolio”.

AND, I have a great little action to share. I’ve been researching how to make actions, what are the best methods, etc., and I think I’ve made a sweet little action. This action does a lot – tonal curves, selective desaturation, contrast adjustment, high pass sharpen, and a few others. It’s that perfect action that I have gone to time and time again. It can take a good photograph and turn it into something really special. I especially love how it evens out and gives warmth to skin tones. It’s called “Baked”, because after it’s applied, it has that vintage, warm feel of a photo that has been baked in the sun. Here are a few examples…

Photo on the left was the original exposure, nothing was done other than crop. The photo on the right was “baked” at 75% opacity, plus a vignette.

Original exposure was a tad dark, so this was lightened with levels (It’s important to start with a well exposed photo, not too light or dark). Look what it does to jeans! Baked at 80% plus a skin smooth and vignette.

Any newborn photographer will tell you it’s sometimes hard to get that newborn skin color right. This little action takes that red out and leaves creamy newborn skin. Baked applied at about 35%. No other skin smoothing!

Click this link to download:

Baked (245)

To install, unzip the file. Open Photoshop. In your actions palette, click on the little arrow in the corner of the palette. Scroll down to “Load Actions”. Choose the file (should be an .atn file) and you’re all set! I run this with Photoshop CS4. I can’t guarantee it will work with other versions. Enjoy! And if you like it, please leave a comment with a link to some of your photos!

Every Friday over at I heart faces, it’s fix it time! Anyone who wants to can join in -we are all given a photo and a change to fix it up any way we like.

Original:

My “fix-it”:

Here’s what I did:

There was some cleaning up to do on the face and around the mouth. I used the patch tool to clear up the skin. Then I ran portraiture at a very low opacity. The eyes were dark, so I selected the eyes using the select tool in a figure-eight shape, and used curves to bump up the light in the eyes. I also dodged the catchlights just a bit to bring them out.  To convert to black and white I used Gradient Map, then adjusted with curves.