Photo Tip Tuesday - Week Two

Thanks to everyone who participated in the first week of Photo Tip Tuesday.

I had a lot of people tell me that they loved the idea of the link up but didn't have any photo tips to share.  I just wanted to stress that everyone has a photo tip to share and all levels are welcome.  You don't have to know a lot about photography to participate.  Your Photo Tip can be as simple as sharing what lens you used or what your camera settings were.  Or maybe what the light was like when you took your picture, or a step you took to edit it.

For my Photo Tip, I wanted to share a little of my editing workflow.  Of course, every picture is different, but this is a fairly typical process I go through for portraits.

Here is a very under exposed Straight Out of Camera shot.

I shot this in RAW and started my edit in Lightroom. MCP just released a set of free Lightroom presets called Mini Quick Clicks and I wanted to try it out.  So I simply clicked "Best Guess White Balance" and "Increase Exposure 1 Stop" and that brought me to this.






Quite a difference from simply hitting two buttons!!

Then I brought the photo into Photoshop and used Pioneer Woman's Boost action at 30% and the her Slight Lighten action at 50% (because Boost darkened it a little bit.) Then I used Coffee Shop's Baby Powder Room and used the Smooth layer and the Eye Define layer to smooth her skin and sharpen her eyes.  I also used the clone stamp at a low opacity to paint the grass over the white area of bokeh behind her, because I thought it was distracting.  That brought me to this.

Here are my before and afters.



Ok, link up your Photo Tips below, and remember, your tips don't have to be this involved, any simple tip will do. I always love knowing what lenses people use to get shots so thats a great place to start if you don't know what tip to share!