The Shirley Collection for Elements Users

Even though Elements is supposed to be a bit easier and a bit more basic than the CS versions of Photoshop, when it comes to actions it is actually more difficult. Elements does not have the ability to create actions in the first place, so actions created in CS-CS5 have to be loaded as "photo effects", which is a bit different. This tutorial is for everyone who has purchased/received my Shirley Collection and would like to find out how to get the best out of it using PSE. You can click on each image for a closer look.

First of all, you open an image. On the right side you see the Effects and then the layers palette, the latter of which is selected in the image below so you can see the background layer. Your actions will be in the effects palette under "All".

I will not get into the blending mode, here switched to "Normal", at this point. But the opacity, here set to 100%, will definitely be important when dealing with actions, so make sure you keep in mind where it is.

My first step will be to run the action named "dreamy" from the Shirley Collection by clicking on the action and hit "Apply" at the bottom. For the following image I dragged my layers palette a bit to the left, which is just a personal preference. See how "Dreamy" is now a folder on top of your background layer and has changed the image?

Photoshop CS users will be able to open that folder and work on each individual file. That is NOT possible in Elements. All you can do to adjust this particular action is to adjust the opacity, underlined with red, to taste. To me, the action made the image look a bit too over-processed, so I lowered the opacity to 61%:

Since actions run on the background layer (meaning with the background layer selected), you can either select the background layer now or Click on LAYER-FLATTEN IMAGE to compress all layers into one. You can now no longer adjust "Dreamy", though, but it is out of the way.

Not all actions end up being collected in a folder, though. Let's run "Strawberry" next. Here is what it'll look like:

You now have several layers stacked on top of the background layer and the action is way too intense for our image. The "Strawberry Haze" is just a bit too much, especially after applying "Dreamy" first. So lower the opacity of that layer to taste (I picked 20%, just to keep a slight warm tone). I also slightly adjusted the layer named "Deeper Color". 

I realize some of you will prefer having all the layers in a folder, so you only have to adjust one opacity. Having a bunch of separate layers ultimately gives you more freedom to adjust and customize the actions, though.

Go to LAYER-FLATTEN IMAGE. The next action I ran is called "Eye See You". Again, it appears on top of the background layer, but next to the folder you might remember from "Dreamy", there is now a layer mask. The layer mask is completely black and I marked it in the picture below with a x.

When the layer mask is black it means the action wasn't applied to any part of the image. We masked it off. For this particular action, we want to have control over it. It's not supposed to be applied to the entire image, only to the eyes. The layer mask gives us the ability to now paint the action in where we want it: the eyes. After running the action, a white brush is automatically selected for you. All you may have to do is adjust its size at the top left, marked with a red line below.

Make the brush tip a little bit smaller than the size of your subject's eyes. If you move over from where you adjust the brush size and look to the right of it, there is now a second opacity adjustment. Make sure it's set to 100%. It determines whether or not you draw at "full power".

Now paint once right on top of the eyes. See the difference? Also, do you see the white spots appearing on the black layer mask?

If the effect is too much, lower the opacity like we did before.

Go to LAYER-FLATTEN IMAGE and run the action "Lovely Skin". CS users can adjust the skin tone for each subject, but in Elements that's not possible, because you can't open the folder the action comes in. Instead, I gave you three different actions with the title "Lovely Skin" - one for light, medium, and dark skin tones. Once you have applied the action, adjust the brush size and paint over you subject's skin. This is what it will look like:

Make sure you don't paint over the eyes. "Lovely Skin" includes a soft blur and the eyes should definitely be as sharp and clear and crisp as possible. Avoid the mouth as well. If you end up painting over the eyes and mouth, just change the color of the brush from white to black and color over the image again.

In the picture above, I marked the current color of the brush at the bottom left with an x. Right now, white is on top. If you want to erase the action, switch it to black. So paint with white, erase with black! 

PLEASE NOTE: In order for this to work, the layer mask (the rectangle next to the folder in the layers palette) has to be selected at all times.

I lowered the opacity of "Lovely Skin" to about 75% and here is the overall before and after:

Hope this tutorial helped and you enjoy your Shirley Collection!

7 Most Basic Photography Editing Steps

Every time I edit a picture I find myself repeating the same basic steps before I enhance the picture with more customized little tweaks. Since it took me over a year of using Photoshop almost every day to become somewhat proficient at it (and I still haven't finished learning all about it), I figured I'd share these simple steps with you to make the whole process a bit less intimidating! Let's go through them together while working on this image of my sister. In between each step you might want to click on Layer-Flatten Image in order to avoid confusion.

Step 1: Adjust Brightness

This image is obviously a little bit too much on the dark side. In order to fix this, go to Image-Adjustments-Brightness/Contrast and move the sliders until you think your image looks good.

In this case, I picked +32 Brightness and +10 Contrast.

Step 2: Sharpen

Unless you prefer a dreamy/hazy look, it is probably a good idea to sharpen your image at this point. Go to Filter-Sharpen-Unsharp Mask. You can play around and watch the preview to see what that does to your picture. Personally, I like to set my Amount to 18%, my Radius to 55 Pixels, and my Threshold to 1 Level.

Step 3: Adjust Levels

The colors in this image are a bit dull, so let's fix that! Go to Image-Adjustments-Levels. Now you have two options. You can either use the left and right arrow and slide them towards each other (about 5-20 steps on each side, depending on your taste and image) OR you can click on the left drop tool and select the blackest part of your image with it. Then you pick the drop tool on the right and select the whitest (blown out) part of your image. The great thing about this is that if you make a mistake and don't know how to correct it, you can just cancel the whole thing and start over.

Either way, your image should immediately look a lot more intense and less hazy.

Step 4: Remove Blemishes

Now my little sister here counts herself among the lucky teenagers who has very few problems with her skin, but upon a closer look there are a couple of tiny spots that I would eliminate before handing the image over to her - or a client. This is where the Healing Brush Tool comes in handy! You can find it on the left in Photoshop, it looks like a band-aid. With the tool selected (and the brush sized according to the blemish you wish to correct; 14 in this case) press the ALT key on your keyboard and click on a part of the skin that is close to a blemish, has a similar color, but is clear. Now you've saved that part of the skin as a sample and you can easily replace any blemish with it simply by clicking on it (the blemish, that is)! Very easy and quick. As soon as you move on to a differently colored area of the skin, pick a new skin sample to base the "transformation" on, so you avoid differently colored spots all over the person's face.

Step 5: Adjust the Color Temperature

Since my sister was sitting in the shade, the image looks a bit cold. In fact, it was freezing outside, but she insisted on wearing short sleeves for this. In order to make the image more appealing, let's give it a nice sunshiny look! Clicking on Image-Adjustments-Color Balance will do just that. A window will open up for you to play with. Right now the Midtones are selected. By moving the sliders you can now adjust the midtones and make them a bit more yellow, red, and magenta. Now click on shadows, which will affect the darkest areas of your image (the green bushes in the background, for example). I wanted the green to be a bit more prominent, so that's where the slider went - just a bit, we don't want her to look sick. :) The highlights will deal with, well, the light areas of the image, like her skin. I added a bit of yellow to fake sunshine and a pinch of cyan to get rid of the redness on her nose (it was COLD). 

After doing all of this, here is what the image looks like:

Step 6: Pop the Eyes

Now I am going to tell you how to make eyes really pop... BUT you need to make sure you use this "secret" sparingly. No alien-eyes, please! After all, we edit in order to enhance beauty, not to make a person look unnatural and photoshopped... It's like make-up, you want it to look like you are wearing none. :) Our first step is to use the magnetic lasso tool to select the iris in each eye. After selecting the first one, you can press and hold the SHIFT key to add another selection without losing the first one.

Now right click on the image with the tool still selected and pick "layer via copy". You now have a separate layer that only contains the eyes. With that layer selected, go to Filters-Other-High Pass and choose 9 pixels. Now change the blending mode (on top of the layers) from "normal" to "soft light" or "overlay" (again, be careful, we don't want alien eyes). With the "Sponge" tool on the left (set to "saturate", not "desaturate") you can pop the color of the eyes a bit, too. It's a slight difference, but very powerful! If you like you can now also use a soft white brush at about 15% opacity and paint on the white in the eyes. Just a bit.

Step 7: Remove Eye-Bags

Another thing I like to do is to remove/soften the bags some people have under their eyes. Sometimes the healing brush I described earlier works well, but you can also use a brush for a similar effect. First, you need to right-click on your background layer and duplicate it. With the new layer selected, use a brush tool roughly the size of the iris in the image. Click on the ALT key and hold it; your cursor has now turned into the eyedropper tool. Select a color close to the person's eyes, but not as dark as the eye-bags. Now change the brush opacity to about 20% and simply color over the bags (and other parts of the skin, if you like)! By adjusting the layer opacity you can now lessen the effect if the skin looks too soft.

After these 7 little steps, check out the difference (please forgive the fuzziness, this is re-sized for protection):

And because these steps are a bit time-consuming, the nice people of Photoshop have enabled us to create Actions that do a bunch of this and much more for us at a fraction of the time! :)

Hope this helped and I'd love to read your comments if you have something to add or alter!