Tuesdays with Becka | Before & After | Tips and Tricks

I stole Tuesday from Nate this week. I just had too many things to blog and too little time. So I gave him the week off. ;) Recently we’ve been getting a few messages asking us to do more before and after posts like we used to. Well, beloved blog friends, ask and you shall receive! (You can find other before and after posts here, here, and here.) To be completely transparent with you, I’ve been wary of doing posts about this recently because we are not doing anything that fancy or ground breaking behind the scenes. I’ve actually found myself getting into an editing rhythm which I think everyone tends to do. I know what actions and tweaks best fit our style and I tend to stick to those. I also find myself needing to make less and less adjustments as our shooting improves and our photos straight out of the camera need less done to them. But, I know that a lot of people just have no idea where to start when looking at their images on the computer screen so hopefully this helps…

The top photo is straight out of my 5D mk II with the 50mm  f/1.2L

To get from before to after I opened the image in Photoshop CS4 and ran the following actions on it from the Totally Rad Action Sets:
Lights On 100% opacity
Select-O-Sharp painted with a soft edge brush over the subjects with brush opacity and flow both set at 25%
Lux hard at 14% opacity

There are a lot of action sets out there available to photographers and we use select actions from quite a few of them. Some of our most beloved favorites come from the talented people over at Totally Rad. The Totally Rad Actions are solid tools and cover a wide range of styles so photographers from traditional, to modern, to vintage, to bright and poppy can find something that will help them out and give their workflow a booster shot. Using actions is a faster way of running intricate sets of adjustments. If you’re looking for a way to add some flavor to your images and invest in your business, these actions may be a great place to start! Be careful not to let actions take over your images though. Think of actions as makeup for your images. (Stay with me here guys.) You want to have them there to enhance and amplify, but you don’t want someone to look at your photo and be able to tell all the things that it’s “wearing”. You want your image to wear the actions, not the other way around.

If you’re interested in purchasing these actions you can do so over at the Totally Rad Store or by clicking either of the banners on this page.