A creative action edit by Beckie

this post written by Beckie of beckiegkengle.com

I did this edit in CS5 using only Everyday Elements’ actions.

I started out this edit first by straightening the horizon. I do my best to do that in camera, but sometimes it just doesn‘t happen quite right. So, the ruler tool, which took me ages to find (hint: it’s hiding behind the eye-dropper tool in case you didn’t already know that), came in really handy today. (this first image is my SOOC image)

After straightening the image out, I ran “Deep Clean Part 1” and tweaked a few layers. Then brightened the eyes by painting over the layer mask on the “bright eyes/catch-lights” layer, and fixed the circles under her eyes on the “YOU fix under eye circles” layer. I then ran “Deep Clean Part 2” (keep in mind when using “Deep Clean”-do not flatten your layers between running 1 and 2; run it with the top layer of “Deep Clean 1” selected), and did some light skin smoothing and eye sharpening. Then I flattened my layers, and saved my clean edit.

It’s important to save your clean edit before moving onto any creative editing. 

I am using “Virginia” from the EE “Coast to Coast” action set. I chose this action because the name reminded me of her little vintage dress! I turned off the “water” layer as it was a bit too cool for my taste. Then I flattened and saved again (making sure to change the file name to include the new action I used so I didn’t save over the clean edit).

I chose to add a hint of haze to this image by using the “add a haze” action from the “Everyday Essentials” action set. I used the “mango” layer (my favorite!) and made sure to paint over the subject so she wasn’t hazy. I also checked the “bring back the contrast” layer and reduced the opacity down to 16% because I wanted a slightly less contrast-y (that’s a word, right?) image! I made one final save (again adding the new extension to the filename), and used the “Web size and sharpen” (from “Everyday Essentials”) to get it ready for this post.

From start to finish, this image only took me about 5 minutes to process (and that was probably only because it took me a minute to decide which creative action that I wanted to use).

This is not my usual style of editing, but with my daughter’s vintage dress, I felt like the image needed a little vintage feel to it!

(if you are curious…my settings for this shot were f/3.2, 1/1600 ss, and ISO 1600, shot with my D700 and 35mm f/2. It was about 7:30 pm)

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