Not that Wordless Wednesday

Photo editing with me style.

Original – What can I say… I love me some sunburst back-lit pictures.

Here is the original next to the final version, and then, it next to the final black and white version.

Now… let’s get to step showing.

1. Open a curves layer and edit first going to your red channel, then green, then blue. Once those are done go to RGB channel and select the black line and do any more tweaking you wish.

2. Take that layer and change the blend mode to soft light at 70% opacity.

3. Create a gradient layer going at a diagonal of about –30 degrees. Make your firs color a dark brown and your second a good strong orange. Turn the brown’s opacity down to about 25%.

4. Turn your gradient layer’s blend mode to linear burn with an opacity of about 20%.

5. Do a slight bump to both your brightness and contrast.

6. Create an exposure layer. Nudge your Offset and Gamma Correction until you get just a touch of a hazy effect to your photo.

7. Duplicate your background and select all your editing layers. Merge. Then if you want run a noise corrector. I ran Noiseware and used the Landscape preset.

(I know mine looks like I skipped the last step…. I didn’t. *sigh* I’ll explain at the end why some things don’t look the same from one step to another in layer set up…)

8. Duplicate your merged layer and go to Smart Sharpen. I increased it until details were crisp and mostly overlooked any noise being added, that will be taken care of next.

9. On your sharpness layer create a mid-dark gray layer mask then take a soft white brush and go over things you want to bring more detail to. I went around the edges of her, the stitch detail on her shirt, her features, and the camera. And that’s it for this part!

Now… the black and white conversion.

10. Change your image mode to Grayscale.

11. Then go and change it again to Duotone. Pick your colors (even if you just use black and white… or a very dreamy pink and purple, lol…. or a classy super dark brown and pale pale cream) then click on the curves for each and adjust until your happy.

Now… I can’t tell you how many times I almost gave up on this post!!! Photoshop was literally crashing every other blessed step. But I trudged on, saving a TIFF of both my working image and of my screen shots so that I could post.

(linking up here, here, here, here, here, and here)