We love the new fashion colours of the images that are being done by so many of the photographers all over the world today, I know I love them. I love the muted colours, the hard flash contrast look and the old fashioned film looks, just to name a few different styles.

I have created a set of actions that you can use on any image quickly and easily.

Actions in order from left to right, top to bottom:

1. Original
2. Sexy Split Tone V1
3. Sexy Split Tone V2
4. Vintage Fade
5. Polaroid
6. Coffee Stain
7. Freeze
8. Hard Flash Black & White
9. Hard Flash Colour
10. Fashion Colour Film
11. Fashion B&W Film

You can also mix and match the actions together to create even more different looks:

Action reciepes:

1. Vintage Fade + Fashion Colour Film
2. Fashion Black & White + Coffee Stain
3. Hard Flash Colour + Freeze
4. Hard Flash Black & White + Fashion Colour Film

Last night I had an opportunity to take photos of my friend Sharlin. She is so incredibly gorgeous, happy and full of life. She just lights up the room and it was a pleasure taking photos of her.

She did so well for her first time in front of the camera. We had a lot of laughs and got some incredible images.

Here’s the best of the shoot:

Again, what you see is what was in camera, so the photoshop of these images is minimal

A big thanks to everyone who entered the competition!! We have a winner – username: Bert. He has the choice of any one of the AllyKatDesign Actions FOR FREE that you can find here in the shop.

Also I have a sneak peak for you – Beauty Retouching Actions.

I have included before and after samples of the action.

The actions are designed to help you cut down on your retouching time by doing all the fiddly work for you. There will be a few different choices of effects such as adding a tan and different skin glow effects, including the famous Jill Greenburg glow effect.

In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to do a retro fashion shoot retouch from start to finish.  This is a beautiful glowy look that is perfect for outdoor photos.

All the edits that you are doing are 100% none destructive, which means that you can go back at any time and tweak the different layers to your liking.

Difficulty: Intermediate – Advanced

Completion time: 1 hour – 2 hours

Tools: Adobe PhotoshopCS1 +

Resources

The image you want to edit

or

The stock gallery can be found here if you want some other images to play with 

http://niniel-stocks.deviantart.com/

What you’ll be creating

Note: For Mac users, the correspondent keys for CTRL and ALT are CMD and OPTION.

STEP 1

First things first, lets adjust the colour.

I’ve used a curves adjustment layer. I moved the curve up in the highlights, up a little in the mid tones and the moved the blacks up a little bit to make them a bit muddier and more film like.

STEP 2

The next step is to remove all the imperfections on the models skin. In this image, the model has young clear skin, so there wasn’t too much to do.

I’ve circled in blue all the spots that you would want to fix. I used the clone tool, set at 50% opacity on a new layer with the sample all layers option. This makes it easier to blend the clone tool.

STEP 3

Now lets bring out the eyes!

Add a brightness/contrast adjustment layer.

The settings that I used are:

Brightness: +26

Contrast: +31

Fill the mask in with black and use a soft brush with the foreground colour set to white to mask out the eyes.

STEP 4

Now that the eyes are all gorgeous and bright, lets make the colour pop!

This time with just the iris masked out adjust the colour of the eyes.

In the Midtones I used the following settings:

Cyan: -17

Magenta: +10

Yellow: +11

In the Shadows I used the following settings:

Cyan: +10

Magenta: 0

Yellow: +10

Basically, you just want to play with the colour settings until you have an effect that you think looks good.

STEP 5

Next make a merged copy of all the layers by pressing shift-ctrl-alt-E and turn it off. We’ll be using that layer later.

STEP 6

Add a colour fill adjustment layer and make the colour: #040426. Make sure that this layer is underneath the merged copy that we made just before.

Change the blend mode of this layer to exclusion and lower the opacity to 70%

STEP 7

Add another colour fill adjustment layer and make the colour: #fff6d9

Change the blend mode of this layer to multiply and lower the opacity to 50%

STEP 8

Turn on the merged copy layer and change the blend mode to softlight.

Add a hue and saturation layer above the merged copy and set the saturation to -100.

Clip it to the soft light layer by hovering the mouse in between the two layers and hold the alt key and click. When you hover between the layers you will see the mouse pointer turn to this:  You can also create a clipping mask by selecting the first layer above the base layer in the Layers panel, and choose Layer > Create Clipping Mask.

When you clip a top layer to the bottom layer, it just means that the clipped layer only affects the base layer that its clipped to.

STEP 9

Just to finish off the sun drenched look, create a new blank layer at the top of your layer stack. Fill it with white. Make sure that you background layer is set to white and the foreground colour is set to: #feedb7

Go to Filter>Render>Clouds. Change the blend mode to soft light and lower the opacity to 60%.

And there you have a gorgeous sun drenched vintage styled image. This style of editing can work on many different images, just give it a shot and have fun!

This seems like an easy thing to do but I’ve noticed that people are still asking about it So here’s how you can achieve this effect with this easy to follow tutorial. All the edits that you are doing are 100% none destructive, which means that you can go back at any time and tweak the different layers to your liking.

Difficulty: Basic – Intermediate

Completion time: 1/2 to 1 hour

Tools: Adobe PhotoshopCS1 +

Resources

The image you want to convert to B&W with a splash of colour

or

The stock gallery can be found here if you want some other images to play with

http://glamourousacid-stock.deviantart.com/

What you’ll be creating

Note: For Mac users, the correspondent keys for CTRL and ALT are CMD and OPTION.

STEP 1

Open the image that your using in photoshop and apply a channel mixer adjustment layer.

The settings that I used were the default Black and White with red filter (RGB) which is red – 100%

STEP 2

Then on the mask with a soft brush, using black as the foreground colour, you just mask out the part of the image that you want in colour.

And that’s basically it. You can also use a hue/saturation adjustment layer and the black and white adjustment layer in the same fashion. I prefer the channel mixer as it give a lot more control over how the black and white will look in the end.

Optional:

You can also duplicate the back ground layer, and place it above the channel mixer layer, change the blend mode to soft light and create a muted colour instead of black and white.

Here’s the same effect, but the blend mode is set to overlay:

And here the blend mode is set to screen with lips masked out again.

Handy tip: When applying the same mask again, hold the alt key and drag the mask up. This will duplicate the mask without you needing to redo it all over again!

The lips look a little washed out here, so lets duplicate the background layer again, place it on top of the layer stack, change the blend mode to multiply, apply the same mask as the screen layer, but press ctrl-i with the mask selected to invert it and change the opacity to 50%.

So there you have a quick and easy black and white image with selective colour and few more bonus techniques on how to make your images pop!

I would love to see what you come up with and any feedback that you may have.

Update: If you do a lot of selective colouring have a look at AllyKatDesign Selective Colouring Actions here.

Last week I worked with Tiffany again, a model that I have worked with for about two years now. She is an absolute pleasure to work with and I always get amazing images with her

These images have been minimally photoshopped as the lighting and exposure was perfect in camera.

A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure with shooting with the gorgeous Emily from Model Mayhem. It was a gangster styled shoot and also another chance for me to practise new lighting set ups. She was truly a wonderful inspiration to work with!

I’ve received a lot of requests from people asking about my work flow and how to achieve the same results. I’m going to show you how to recreate this image:

The hard work was done with my lighting set up in order to get the right shadows and highlights. The lighting set up that I used is called butterfly lighting, where the soft box is in front of the model, pointing down at a 45⁰ angle approximately a foot to two feet above the camera. I also had a hair light with barn doors on a boom directly above the models head, so that her hair wouldn’t disappear into the background and to give highlights across the shoulders.

You can also add a reflector at the front to bounce the light and fill in the shadows under the nose and chin if you wish.

This is a beautiful and flattering light, which enhances the right features and smoothes out others. Also depending on how the model poses, you can achieve different effects with the same set up.

1. As you can see the image on the left is a perfect example of butterfly lighting and how beautifully it can light the subject, when they are facing straight on the camera.
2. In the centre image that we’re working on, you can see that the lighting still flatters when the model turns her face to the side.
3. In the image on the right, the same lighting was still used, but the model leaned forward creating a harsher effect that is still striking never the less.

All three of these photos were edited in the same way.

This is the image as shot in camera:

You can see that because we got the lighting right in the studio and the exposure correct, the raw image doesn’t need a lot of work, ie playing with adding in shadows, highlights or fixing spots that are too dark or overexposed etc.

The next step is to do a quick correction, where under eye circles are minimised and blemishes retouched. The model is a bit rosy as it was hot the day this image was taken, so I’ve gone through and evened out her skin tone and then did an overall skin softening.

So the layers that have been created so far:

• Skin retouch with the clone tool set at 50% opacity
• Color fill layer, set to blend mode hue and 50% opacity with a mask for the skin only to reduce redness.
• Skin smoothing layer that softens the skin.

All of these layers are in a group labelled skin retouch.

I applied a channel mixer adjustment layer to convert the image to black and white.

I then created a composite  layer of all retouched layers, excluding the channel mixer layer, placed on the top of the layer stack and changed the blend mode to overlay. This increased the contrast and saturation of image in a controllable way.

Final step here is to fill in the colour of her lips as they seem to fade away into the background. I did this with another colour fill layer, with the blend mode set to soft light.

So the layers that you will end up with are the following:

• Skin retouch with the clone tool set at 50% opacity
• Colour fill layer, set to blend mode hue and 50% opacity with a mask for the skin only to reduce redness.
• Skin smoothing layer that softens the skin.

All of these layers are in a group labelled skin retouch.

• Channel mixer layer
• Composite layer of all the retouched layers with blend mode set to overlay
• Colour fill layer, set to blend mode softlight with a mask for the lips only.

So there it is, from start to finish. You can add in a few extra steps, such as a curves adjustment layer underneath the overlay layer to bring out the shadows a bit more, or you can run a high pass to sharpen the image up or just selective sections of it, such as her hair and necklace with a mask, the possibilities are only limited by how you envision the final product.

Happy Shooting!

A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure with shooting with the gorgeous Georgia-Leigh from Model Mayhem. It was a rock and roll styled shoot and also another chance for me to practise new lighting set ups. It was an incredibly fun challenge to get the images as close to perfect in camera, with only minimal photoshopping afterwards.

Stayed tuned for a lighting break down of this shoot

A week ago I had the pleasure of shooting with Naomi. It was her first time in front of the camera and she did brilliantly