Photoshop Friday.

I thought I'd try a little experiment. Every Friday I'm going to post something related to editing photos or Photoshop. I get a lot of questions from people asking about editing or how to do things in Photoshop. So, I'm opening up to questions. If you have questions, any questions, about editing photos, using Bridge, or Photoshop, e-mail me. Then I'll address those questions on my blog.

To start off, I thought I'd give an example of how I edit. My rule of thumb when editing pictures is "less is more". With all my photos, I want them to look as natural and "real" as possible. So I try not to over-edit my photos.

This picture is straight out of the camera. I chose this one because it's a little under-exposed.


I open all my photos in "Bridge". I think this just comes with Photoshop. I do a lot of my editing here. In this photo, I bumped up the exposure and added a "strong contrast". Sometimes I add a little more "black" and "fill light" depending on the photo.



Then I open it in Photoshop. The first thing I do is use "curves" (Ctrl + M). I bring up the lights and take down the darks to add a bit more contrast. You can get the same effect using "levels" (Ctrl + L). I use the "spot healing brush" (looks like a bandaid) to get rid of blemishes (baby zits). Then I smoothed out the skin a little using "Pro Retouch" from Totally Rad Actions. If you don't have actions, you can get the same effect using Filter-Blur-Gaussian Blur. I then did a little dodging and burning on the face and hand using Yin/Yang also from Totally Rad Actions. And then I do a little sharpening using Kevin Kubota's Magic Sharp. You can also do Filter-Sharpen-Unsharp mask.
And with that, you get this:

Here's the 3 next to each other so you can compare.

So. E-mail me your questions. Anything is fair game. I am NOT a photoshop expert and still have a ton to learn myself, but I'm happy to pass along what I do know.