Actions and Textures

Here’s another photo editing tutorial.  Once again, I do not proclaim to be an expert OR to know everything there is.  I’m just passing along what I’m learning.  I do all my editing using Photoshop (CS4) so I understand that not everyone can do these exact edits, but I believe they have some action type effects in Picnik?  Most of these work in Elements as well, the menus may be different, but it gives you the basic idea.

A few months ago I posted this photo during You Capture:

A lot of people asked about the editing for it so today I’m going to share with you how to use Actions!!!

First pick a picture.  Before I started editing using the action, I went in and adjusted my brightness/contrast and levels.

Now comes the fun part.  Actions!!!  Actions can allow you to take your run of the mill pictures and make them look like this:

Or this:

Or even maybe this:

You can find FREE actions for photoshop and elements over at Pioneer Woman (what CAN’T she do?!) Or probably just google free actions.

You need to load the actions into your editing program (again, just google this process!).  Now it is time to play around.  I will be using my favorite action, Seventies, through the whole tutorial so you can see the same action beginning to end.

Go to your action menu and select which action you’d like to use.

Hit the play button to apply the action.

Some people would be willing to just stop at applying the action.  It looks nice enough.

I tweaked the levels a little bit.  You can also adjust the opacity of the action to determine the amount of the effect that is applied to the picture.

I also have started playing around with adding textures to my pictures.  Once again, google will be your friend.  Just search for free textures.  Or crinkle up a piece of paper, scan it onto your computer, and make your own.

You will open your texture separately from your original picture. Sometimes you have to crop out some parts you might not want to use.  This one didn’t go all the way to the edge so I just cropped out the blank part.

Rotate it to the direction of your original picture.

Check the image size of your texture and then go to your original photo and match it.  If your photo is horizontal, just make sure the width is the same and if your photo is vertical, just match the height. In photoshop, this is found under image>image size.

Copy and paste the texture image directly onto your original image.  You will NOT be able to see any of the original image (yet).

Select a blending mode (top left of your layers box- is usually set on normal).  Overlay is usually pretty simple, but it is fun playing around with some of the other ones if you have the time.

Holy crinkles Batman!  Obviously, this is a little too intense for this picture.  That’s when the magic of adjusting the opacity comes in.

Much better! Just a little hint of wrinkling to add some dimension.

So here is our starting point, once again:

And the final product:

Feel free to share your action and texture tips!  Make your own tutorial or I’m even up for someone else who has some tricks up their sleeves to guest post some editing tricks.  Just let me know

Now time to share your opinion on my next big adventure.  I’m finally going to get brave and open an etsy shop so people can buy prints.  I’m trying to figure out what process I’m going to use to do this.  Would you be more willing to spend a few extra dollars for me to order the pictures and then personally mail them out to you OR save a few dollars and I put the order into the photo developer and they ship them to you?  I would offer the pricing and sizes available for this option.