I recently published an article about a new set of actions that I have created – the Lomo effect action set and I have had a bunch of emails sent through to me asking for a tutorial, showing step by step how to achieve it, so here it is

Difficulty: Basic – Intermediate

Completion time: 1/2 to 1 hour

Tools: Adobe PhotoshopCS +

Resources

Your image

or

The stock image used for this tutorial is from TwiggXstock and can be found here.

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 you want to create the lomo effect in photoshop and apply a brightness/contrast adjustment layer.

The settings that I used:

Brightness – 10

Contrast – 10

STEP 2

Then apply the following settings to a levels  adjustment layer.

The settings that I used:

Red Channel – shadow input level -39 and highlight input level – 223

Green Channel – shadow input level -39 and highlight input level – 223

STEP 3

Create a new blank layer and fill it with white, setting the blend mode of the layer to multiply. Then go to Filter>Distort>Lens Correction and apply the following setting: Lens Correction : -100. Leave all the other settings at the default.

STEP 4

Press crtl-shift-alt-E to create a merged copy of what you are working on. Go to Filters>Blur> Gaussian Blur.

The setting that I used:

Radius – 10px.

Optional

If you’re  so inclined you can also add a light leak to your image by using a gradient adjustment layer.

STEP 1

Apply a gradient adjustment layer to the top of all of your layers.

The colour I have used here is: #ff6e02

To create your own gradient open up the  gradient editor and place three different stops along the bottom like the screenshot:

1. location 0%
2. location  8%
3. location 100%

Then make sure that you have 4 opacity stops at the top.

1. location 0% with opacity 0%
2. location 8% with opacity 100%
3. location 20% with opacity 0%
4. location 100% with opacity 100%

You can also change the colour of the light leak or the intensity by moving the stops around.

STEP 2

Change the blend mode of the adjustment layer to pin light and the opacity to 90% and you’re done!

You can also download the lomo action set, which contains 8 different lomo effects and 3 light leak effects.

Lomo Effect (29.7 KiB)

And preview the 8 different effects in this post: Lomo Action Set

Here’s a couple of examples of the actions in action

Stock Image:  ~hatestock

Stock Image : ~Alraunie-stock

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

The 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.

Ok so we have slugged through white balance and how to expose an image, now we are going to learn how to compose an image.

I have detailed some basic principles of composition in this article and then gone into some more depth with different ways of composing, such as the golden mean, the rule of thirds and the golden spiral.

Basic principles of composition

• Center of interest: Decide what the focal point of your image is before composing.
• Simplicity: Avoid busy backgrounds. Keep the composition simple.
• Subject off center: Place a subject slightly off-center rather than in the middle of a photo.
• Horizon lines: Don’t place the horizon right in the middle of the image. This also applies to any strong horizontal or vertical lines. Also ensure that the lines aren’t tilted.
• Leading lines: Strong lines should lead the eye to the main point of interest, not out of the frame.
• Foreground objects: Don’t be afraid to include an interesting object in the foreground of a scene. It can can add depth, dimension and a point of reference.
• Vary angles: Different angles can show the subject from a different view point. Move the camera around. You can shoot looking down (birds eye) or looking up (worms eye).
• Framing: Frame your subject by using zoom or moving closer. Draw attention to what you are shooting.
• Silhouettes: The subject of your image doesn’t always need to be brightly lit. Try finding photographing  backlit subjects.
• Reflections: Adds an interesting, sometimes abstract, look to a photo.
• Symmetry: An identical or near-identical image of its other half. Use of symmetry often provides a formal balance.

There are no hard and fast rules for composition of an image. There are five different ways to help us, but they are only used as guidelines rather than rules.

Golden Ratio

The golden ratio is a principle that has been around for hundreds of years. It has been used by Leonardo Da Vinci, who investigated the principle that underlies our notions of beauty and harmony, but before that Egyptian, Babylonian and ancients Greek masters also applied this principle in architecture and art.

The Golden Ratio shows us that certain points in an image attract the viewers attention. The same in regards to nature or man made objects with certain proportions will automatically please us, whether this is by chance or design.

As shown above, the image is divided into 9 unequal parts. Each line is drawn so that the width of the resulting small part of the image relates to that of the big part exactly as the width of the whole image relates to the width of the big part. Points where the lines intersect are the “golden” points of the picture:

Rule of thirds

This method of composition is probably the most well know one. All budding photographers are taught this, as well they should, because it creates well balanced and interesting shots. This is a simplified version of the Golden Ratio.

The principle is very simple. You are just breaking down the image into thirds, horizontally and then vertically. You then are placing the points of interest along those lines.

As you can see from the example below, I have placed the old man on the crutches on the far right hand side of the image, with a wake of swan trailing behind him. I deliberately placed the sky in the top third, the  sea at the middle and the beach sand on the bottom third to make him the focal point of the image.

The theory of the rule if thirds is that if you have points of interest of interest in the intersections of the lines or on the lines, your image is better balanced and enables the viewer to interact with it more naturally. Different studies have shown that people when viewing images, their eyes go to the intersecting lines naturally  rather than the centre of the image. So by using the rules of thirds, it helps viewing the image rather than working against it.

Golden Spiral

The golden spiral is another way to compose an image. A lot of images that are taken in the fashion are usually flowers, but it can be applied to any image to make it well composed and dynamic. As you can see from the example above, the spiral uncoils starting with the snail, then flows out into the larger part. The focal point is the smallest coil, which is nearer the corner. this means that the viewers eye is drawn to the focal point and then is taken through the image as it unfolds around the golden ratio.

As you can see there are few different methods of how to compose your images, making them more dynamic and interesting to the viewer.

Have fun composing

Welcome to the first part of many articles about how to take an awesome photo.

The best place to start is getting the colours right. And to get the colours right we need to know about white balance.

A lot digital camera owners don’t understand/ don’t care/ don’t use a very important aspect of photography which is white balance. This is something that is worth learning as it has a big impact on the photos that you take with your camera.

The crux of white balance is this: when white balance is adjusted properly it will show the colours as accurately as possible.

So now the million dollar question – what is white balance? It all comes down to colour temperature. This is a way of measuring the quality of the light source. It is based on the ratio of amount of blue light to the amount of red light, while the green light is ignored. The unit for measuring this ratio is Kelvin (K). The higher the colour temperature  value, the cooler the light as it has more blue light in ratio to red. The lower the colour temperature value, the warmer the light as it has more red in ratio to blue.

A Kelvin huh? What’s that? Good question It started when a British physicist William Kelvin heated a block of carbon. As it heated up the carbon glowed, producing a range of different colours at different temperatures. It first produced a dim red light, then increased to a brighter yellow as the temperature rose, to eventually producing a bright blue white glow at its highest temperature. The unit Kelvin is a variation Centigrade degrees. The Kelvin scale starts at absolute zero which is -273 centigrade. So basically you subtract 273 from  a Kelvin temperature to get the centigrade. Although the colour temperature is referenced to the different types of lights that correspond to the visible colour matching a standard black body not the temperature that the filament burns.

The following table shows the correlated colour temperature of common light sources:

Note that Kelvin values listed in the table are approximate rather than exact. You need to keep in mind that a new light bulb and new flash have higher color temperature than their old and used equivalents, and an electronic flash is designed to have a color temperature comparable to that of average sunlight.

Preset White Balance Settings

Here are some of the basic White Balance settings you’ll find on cameras:

• Auto – This is when the camera decides what is best for the photo. It was a bit hit and miss in the earlier digital models, but the newer ones are a great deal more accurate. Don’t limit yourself to this setting though, especially when you can create wonderful images by tweaking the white balance.

• Tungsten – this mode counteracts the warmth of tungsten lighting and brings the white balance up to cool the image. It is symbolised by a little bulb.

• Fluorescent – this compensates for the ‘cool’ light of fluorescent light and will warm up your shots.

• Daylight/Sunny – this is the average white balance.

• Cloudy – this setting warms the photo a touch to compensate for clouds.

• Flash – camera flash can be quite blue, so this setting warms up the image.

• Shade – the light in shade is generally cooler (bluer) than shooting in direct sunlight so this mode will warm things up a little.

TIP: use the shade setting when taking photos in the forest. It will give you warm accurate colours!

Setting your own white balance

To set the white balance manually all you need is a gray card. Why a gray card? Because 18% gray reflects all the colours of the spectrum equally.

Once you have taken the image, most cameras have a menu option that will allow you to bring up the image and set it as the custom white balance, then instruct you to change the preset to the proper white balance setting. This can also be used when taking a series of shots then adjusting the white balance in photoshop or camera raw or lightroom using the gray point eye dropper.

You must have the gray card in the frame with the subject, as there is not point in having the card in your hand as the white balance setting will be different from where the subject is.

The added bonus to doing a custom white balance, resulting in more neutral and natural colors is the total decrease in post production work you’ll have adjusting for improper white balance settings.

So there you have it people – An explanation on white balance. Stay tuned for the next article in this series!

Welcome to the new AllyKatDesign Forum!

Feel free to come and have a look around, register, ask your questions and receive your answers! Make it your happy place that has all the answers that you seek

See you there!

Let’s go there now!

http://forum.allykatdesign.com/

Definition of frustrating: trying to re create sin city rain and having to trawl through a bunch of useless tutorials that just say the same thing over and over again! Never fear loyal readers, I have perfected the perfect sin city rain effect.

Here’s the first lot of rain that I came up with using all the tutorials that I found online:

Basically the formula for this rain is as follows:

1. New layer> Fill 50% grey
2. Filter>Add Noise>Add Noise, Amount 400%, Gaussian, monochrome
3. Transform: 500% with the little link button pressed.
4. Filter>Blur>Motion Blur, angle 75, distance approx 400 (depending on size of image)
5. Set the layer on screen, then duplicate and mask out the offending rain.

As you can see its pretty uniform rain, not very exciting and not at all like the rain that you see in the posters. The lines aren’t thick enough and it looks pretty boring

Here’s the rain that I came up with:

It all came to help with these two brushes that I came up with:

Rain Brushes (9.0 KiB)

Basically all I did to come up with this effect was the following:

1. Two layers with rain underneath the person, first on set at 25% opacity, the top one at 50% opacity to create a look of depth to the image.
2. Then another layer at the top of the image, set at 100% opacity. Just mask out any rain that doesn’t belong.
3. A new layer with the splash II brush across the shoulders and the gun.

Yay all done. Its so much easier than messing around with noise and motion blur etc. You can also change the size of the brush depending on how you want the rain to look, direction etc.

To finish the image off you can add some authentic sin city text and a quote from the movie that will fit in with the person:

The sin city font was done in colour: #ff0000, rotated with layer style>Drop Shadow, Angle: 141, Distance: 21px, spread 4%, size: 0px.

P. S. You can’t see the layer style in this pic unless you move it over to an area that has white in it.

The quote  was done with a shape layer, with the colour set to white and a layer style>Stroke, size: 10px, position:inside, colour black.

Find the sin city font here: Dafont and the writing font here: Blambot

So easy once you know how Enjoy recreating your sin city posters!

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!

In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to achieve the Orton effect, that you can find in my latest group of actions.

1.  If you have retouched the image and made density corrections, press crtl-shift-alt-E to make a merged copy of the image.

If you are working from the original image, press crtl-J. Name this layer Screen and change the blend mode of this layer to Screen.

2. Press crtl-shift-alt-E to make a merged copy, name this layer Multiply and change the blend mode to Multiply.

3. Go to Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur and apply with a radius of 3 px.

Here’s the final image:

Here you can download the action on its own:

Orton Effect Action (2.9 KiB)

Or you can download the whole set here: AllyKatDesign Actions

In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to achieve the Bleach Bypass effect, that you can find in my latest group of actions.

1.  If you have retouched the image and made density corrections, press crtl-shift-alt-E to make a merged copy of the image.

If you are working from the original image, press crtl-J. Change the blend mode of this layer to Multipy.

2. Add a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer and lower the saturation to -45.

3. Add a levels adjustment layer and change the property of the white slider to 200.

4. Add a curves adjustment layer and pull the curve up in the middle to lighten the image..

Here’s the final image:

Here you can download the action on its own:

Bleach Bypass Action (3.9 KiB)

Or you can download the whole set here: AllyKatDesign Actions

In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to achieve the Holga effect, that you can find in my latest group of actions.

1.  If you have retouched the image and made density corrections, press crtl-shift-alt-E to make a merged copy of the image.

If you are working from the original image, press crtl-J.

2. Now go to Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur. Apply the filter with a 5px radius.

3. Add a layer mask and apply a Radial Gradient with white set as your foreground colour.

I usually apply this over a face in the photo. If there are no people then just apply it in a random place on the image.

4. Now press crtl-shift-alt-E to create a new merged copy of all the layers. Go to the Layer Style palette and tick Gradient Overlay. Use the following settings:

Blend mode to Multiply
Opacity:100%
Reverse ticked
Style: Radial
Angle 90
Scale 100%

4. Create Solid Color Fill adjustment layer. Use black as the color and set the blend mode to colour and the opacity to 15%.

5. Create another adjustment layer on top of the color fill layer, this time the photo filter. Use Warming Filter (81), with the density set at 55%. Make sure the preserve luminosity box is ticked.

By using adjustment layers and layer styles, you can go through your layers and adjust the effect to suit the image that you are working with.

Here’s the final image:

Here you can download the action on its own:

Holga Effect Action (7.9 KiB)

Or you can download the whole set here: AllyKatDesign Actions