Editing stray hairs and flyaways is one of the best ways to clean up your image and create a polished and professional portrait. If you are photographing people, being able to do this well is a must! In addition, we want to give our clients the very best images and this basic skill is necessary in order to do so.

The image I will be working with today is a studio portrait of Maddie or Madeleine Scott, a professional ballerina (Instagram: @madsavscott). Maddie had just finished dancing in the studio when I asked her to sit down for a headshot. When I went to go and edit this portrait, I noticed there were some stray hairs that I had forgotten to check for before photographing her headshot and I had to clean up in post processing. 

As I open up the image in the Camera Raw Filter, I first noticed the image was underexposed so I increased the exposure, increased shadows and added luminance and color noise reduction. When I open it up, I notice very small stray hairs that I can easily take care of using the portraiture plugin. Portraiture is great for many reasons including diminishing small stray hairs. For the other flyaways, I will use a different method. After playing the Portraiture plugin, I will flatten all of my layers and duplicate a layer once again. From here, I will use the clone stamp tool and while holding down the “alt” key, select areas of the background very close to the stray hairs and stamp them on top of the hairs. Once I have all of my stray hairs covered, I will place a mask on the stamped layer and invert the mask. That way, I paint on the effect only where the stray hairs are. When I am painting the effect on, I will be using a white brush as my mask is black. I will also have the hardness set higher as I don’t want a feathered edge to my subject’s hair. That’s that! It may take some practice but out of all of the methods I have seen and used, this is my favorite and fastest way of taking care of those pesky little hairs. 

After this, I will retouch the image a little bit more including using the clone stamp tool to take care of banding on my seamless paper backdrop. Afterwards I will start retouching Maddie’s skin and eyes using the Summerana Everyday Workflow Essentials Photoshop Action Collection including “diminish flaws” which is a frequency separation action and also “whiten eyes”. I will also add additional eye and skin highlights as well as a dark vignette using curves!

Here is a video tutorial so you can watch me edit this image from start to finish!

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and found it helpful!

For more helpful tutorials and videos, make sure to subscribe to the Summerana Membership which is filled with hours of editing tutorials complete with actions, overlays and even marketing materials!

The post How to Clean up Strays Hairs and Retouch a Portrait in Photoshop appeared first on SUMMERANA.

In this post I will walk you through on how to add more beautiful Fall colors to your images, and there is also a video tutorial where you can watch me edit from start to finish!

First lets go over how this image was shot. This RAW image was taken with a Canon Mark III and the Canon 135 mm 2.0 Lens. It was taken at 2.0 Aperture under overcast weather using Manual White Balance (Kelvin) at 6500 WB. As you can see, we have a wonderful image to begin with so we don’t have to make many initial corrections.

After my initial adjustments were made in the Camera Raw window in Photoshop, I first look over the image for any distractions. This not only includes any major blemishes on my model but also any weird leaf patterns in my image that would distract your eye away from the subject. Afterwards, I will run the image through Portraiture, which helps my subjects skin and also gives the image as a whole, a smooth and buttery finish. I will also edit and dodge and burn my subjects skin using Summerana’s Everyday Essentials Photoshop actions. Lastly, I will add a blur to the background by making a merge visible layer and running it through a Gaussian blur filter and masking the effect off of my subject. Note: When using Gaussian blur to blur your background, make sure you blur just slightly and carefully mask off of your subject and the focal plane they are standing on including the ground. That way, your blur will look the most believable. 

Now it’s time for some Fall editing fun!  I achieve beautiful red, orange and yellow tones by using the selective color adjustment layer. Once you have it pulled up, you will go though your green, red and yellow panels and bring your cyans down all the way to the left and bring your magenta’s up a tad as well. Afterwards, mask off of your subject and any other areas you feel looks good. I will also use a color balance adjustment layer and pull up the reds and mask off accordingly as well. Lastly, I will create a separate blank layer and paint on at 10% opacity, the colors already found in my background. You can get these colors by holding down the “alt” key and selecting colors from your background using the eyedropper tool.

For some last minute toning and touch ups, I will use Summerana’s light Photoshop action, haze (WHICH I LOVE) and Summernana’s ColorFall Photoshop Actions and ColorFall Flare to make the image pop! That’s it! Thank you so much for going through this tutorial with me. I hope you found it to be helpful and I would love to see what you come up with yourself! <3

BEFORE & AFTER:

Here is the video editing tutorial on how to create Fall colors in Photoshop:

We hope you enjoyed this tutorial!

You can see more plus get Fall Photoshop actions, leaf overlays, Fall marketing templates, and full editing workshops in the Summerana Membership here.

The post How to Create Fall Colors in Photoshop appeared first on SUMMERANA.

Today, I am going to show you an editing hack that I have found very helpful in editing skin in Photoshop – something that can be very hard and takes photographers a long time to learn how to master. This Photoshop hack is simple and will get you smooth and silky skin very quickly in under 5 minutes. After all, who wants to spend all day editing? 

The image that I am going to be working with today is a portrait of a beautiful senior I photographed this Summer. Isn’t she GORGEOUS? Let’s start by going over the basics! I took this RAW image with a Canon Mark III Camera Body, 135 mm 2.0 Lens under overcast weather with a Manual White Balance at 6500 Kelvin. 

When I open up the RAW image in Camera Raw I see that I was pretty lucky. This image is pretty perfect starting out and the only thing I am going to do is lift up the shadows a tad. I will now proceed to opening up the image in Photoshop. 

Generally, I would suggest looking over your image and removing any major blemishes before editing the skin but for the sake of this tutorial, we’ll jump right in. To start with this skin hack, I will first duplicate my background layer. I will then hold down CTRL and click on the duplicated layer and turn it into a “Smart Object”. Afterwards, duplicate the smart object layer once more. You will know have 2 duplicated smart object layers of your original image. 

Now, you will turn off the top layer’s visibility, take the bottom layer and run it under a gaussian blur filter. You will increase the blur until the skin tone looks nice and smooth.

Afterwards, make visible the top layer again and run the layer with a high pass filter. You can do so by going to Filter- Other and then high pass. This layer will be your texture layer. You will need to increase the radius until you can JUST start seeing the textures of the lashes of the eye and the skin and then press enter. Afterwards, you will take the layer and place it under a “hard light” blending mode.

Now you will group the blur layer and the high pass layer together and place a mask over the entire group and invert the mask so that the effect is not visible until you brush it on with a white brush. Now to getting smooth skin! You will now brush the effect on your subject’s skin using a 100% opacity brush and 50% around the eyes and mouth. Avoid any features you don’t want blurry such as the eyes, nose, mouth and hair. If a part of the effect is too strong or too weak, you can go back to your smart object layers and increase or decrease accordingly. You can also decrease the overall effect of the smooth skin hack by decreasing the opacity of the group in its entirety. 

Here is the video editing tutorial:

That’s it! This skin hack will save you lots of time in Photoshop and will take care of blemishes, scars and more in one simple swoop! Have fun <3

Here is the before and after (the after also has some final adjustments + dodging & burning):

We hope you enjoyed this tutorial!

You can see more plus get Photoshop Editing Skin actions, tools, and full editing workshops in the Summerana Membership here.

The post Skin Hack: How to get Smooth and Silky Skin in Photoshop in Under 5 Minutes appeared first on SUMMERANA.