By Linda Sattgast Actions: Enhance Photos Fast! Black & White, Sepia, and Duotone Actions—Photoshop Elements Lesson 01: Black & White Actions Class Photo: dad-and-lad.jpg The Enhance Photos-Black and White action set contains five actions for regular photos—especially photos that include people, and it also has five landscape actions. The first video lesson looked at the first five actions. You can choose to play an individual action or run the PLAY ALL option for both sections. I almost always run the PLAY ALL action because it’s a little hard to predict which one will work the best. BW Sparkle and BW Clean and Crisp are the black and white actions I probably choose the most often, but the others definitely have their place and may work the best for some photos. If you run these actions individually, you can adjust any of the layers to fine tune the effect. For example, you can duplicate the Sharpen-High Pass layer, fill the mask with black, and then paint with white on your photo to increase the sharpening effect just in certain areas. Lesson 02: Black and White Landscape Actions The second half of the black and white actions are the landscape actions. With landscapes or photos of objects, like flowers, it’s often helpful to bring out or emphasize certain colors. The colors are listed in the name of the action. This is not a complete list of all the types of colors you might find in photos, but you’ll find actions for some of the more common colors you might want to emphasize. BW-Landscape Green-Pink Class Photo: pink-flowers.jpg • It’s best to start with an edited photo, so run the Quick Edit action. • Run the BW-Landscape Green-Pink action. • The action stops at the Hue/Saturation dialog box to let you make any manual adjustments. • The Saturation of the Master menu is set to -100, which turns the photo into black and white. If you’re feeling adventuresome, experiment with the other individual color channels in the menu. Here’s how to do it: • Open the Master Menu and choose a color that might affect either the pink or the green, since that’s what we’re targeting in this photo. Red and Magenta would be logical choices that would affect the color pink. Start with Red. • The default setting for red in this action is a Lightness of -30. • Notice that moving the Saturation slider does nothing, so don’t even bother with that slider. • The Hue slider also does nothing. The only slider you need to move is the Lightness slider. • If you move the Lightness slider to the left, the reds in this photo get darker and darker.

Actions: Enhance Photos Fast © 2015 Linda Sattgast, all rights reserved. • If you move the Lightness slider to the right, the reds get lighter and lighter. • I set it to -20. • Now open the menu and choose Magentas. The default for Magenta is set to -100. Experiment to see if you would like a different setting. I left it at -100. • The Green channel is set to +100, but moving the slider hardly changes anything on the photo. • Green often has a lot of yellow in it, so choose Yellow from the menu and move the Lightness slider. You’ll see an immediate effect. I made the leaves darker by changing the setting to -20. • Once you’re satisfied with the look of your photo, click OK. You don’t need to experiment every time you run the black and white landscape actions. I rarely do. I just click OK, and the action continues on, but the option is there if you want to experiment. BW-Landscape Beach Action Class Photo: beach-and-sky.jpg Run the BW-Landscape Beach Action. I used the default settings with any changes to color channels of Hue/ Saturation. BW-Landscape Green-Blue Class Photo: mountain-meadow.jpg Run the action Enhance Photos-Landscape Green-Blue. I ran the action once, and then ran it again to emphasize the effect even more. BW-Fall and Sunset Class Photo: sunset.jpg The BW-Fall and Sunset action emphasizes the red and yellow color channels which affects the outcome of the black and white version. If you want to add some light and contrast, run the Quick Edit action and adjust the opacity as needed. I used 30% opacity. If you run the PLAY ALL Landscape Black and White action, it will create all the landscape black and white layers without stopping to let you adjust Hue/Saturation, except for the Ansel Adams Effect. If you don’t get the effect you’re looking for, you may want to run all the regular black and white actions on your landscape photo. One of them just might be the ticket for your particular photo. Lesson 03: Ansel Adams Effect Ansel Adams is a famous photographer who, in the early 1940’s contracted with the US Department of the Interior to make photographs of National Parks to hang as large murals in the Department’s new building. If you search in a browser for Ansel Adams images, you’ll see many his amazing photographs—it’s well worth your time to do so. My Ansel Adams action seeks to reproduce his style where he manipulated the shades of gray in his black and white photos to bring out the best features in whatever he was photographing, and to draw your eye where he wanted you to look. The ideal photo for this action is an artistically photographed landscape with blue skies and billowing clouds, but you can use it on other landscape photos as well. This action doesn’t really work well for photos of people.

Page 2 Actions: Enhance Photos Fast © 2015 Linda Sattgast, all rights reserved. Practice the Ansel Adams Effect—Photo 1 Class Photo: field-and-sky.jpg • Run the BW Ansel Adams Effect action. • When the Levels dialog box comes up, adjust the sliders to create the effect you want. It has a default setting, but you can adjust the sliders under the Histogram even further. • This photo has a slightly blown out cloud, so move the right slider to the right to minimize that. • Move the left slider to the right to about 15 to increase the darkness. Remember, for an Ansel Adams photo it’s OK to over expose parts of the photo. • Move the middle slider to the left slightly to 0.90. Click OK. • The action finishes and you get a dialog box telling you what to do next. The action selects the Brush tool and resets the Color Chips with white for the Foreground, but you need to make sure you have a soft round brush set to 30% opacity with a Normal Blend Mode. • The Darken mask is active, so start there. On your photo, brush to darken any area you want to be darker. The more you brush over an area, the darker it becomes. A dark sky is typical of an Ansel Adams photo. • When you’re done darkening, in the Layers panel, click on the mask of the Lighten layer to activate it. On your photo, brush to make any area lighter. Practice the Ansel Adams Effect—Photo 2 Class Photo: desert-tree.jpg • Run the PLAY ALL Landscape black and White action. • When the action stops, paint on the masks to bring out dark and light areas for the Ansel Adams Effect. • Check out the other Landscape actions to see how they compare and whether you like them better. • The Landscape Beach action is very similar to the Ansel Adams Effect, and it even shows the flowers on the tree a little bit better. • Out of all five actions, I liked the BW Landscape Beach action and the BW Ansel Adams Effect action the best. TIP: If you click on the Darken layer and Shift click on the Lighten layer and drag them above all the action layers, they will affect not only the Ansel Adams layer, but all the other layers when you reveal them. (Ansel Adams Effect—Photo 3 had no class photo) TIP: When you run the PLAY ALL Landscape Black and White action, you can add a black layer mask to a landscape effect and paint with white to reveal part of that layer, if it improves your photo. Lesson 04: Sepia and Duotones Sepia The Enhance Photos-SEPIA action set is very similar to the Enhance Photos Black and White action set, except you’ll get a sepia tone instead of black and white. The PLAY ALL Sepia action set also works the same, and it allows you to check out which version you prefer. There is one difference I want you to be aware of with the Sepia actions. When you run individual sepia actions, you can alter the saturation of the sepia color by changing the opacity of the Sepia layer. A higher opacity results in a warmer brown. A lower opacity results in a cool and very light brown.

Page 3 Actions: Enhance Photos Fast © 2015 Linda Sattgast, all rights reserved. Duotones Duotones traditionally use two colors to produce one photograph. In this action set I did slip in a few extra colors in some of the duotones, but they were in the same family of colors, so they were mainly in there to get the right tone in the right place. There are two sets of duotone actions. The first one is strictly duotone colors. The easiest way to see them is to run the PLAY ALL Duotones action If you’ve been paying attention to popular photo looks, you’ll recognize some of these very same colors on CD covers and advertisements, so these can be a lot of fun just by themselves, or you can use what I call Duotone Recipes to create other special effects. The second half of the Duotone action set is comprised of Duotone Recipes. (No class photos are available for practice, since I don’t own the photos.) Horse • With this photo I started by running the Faded Ivory action. I liked the effect, but it was just a little too light, so when that’s the case you can hide one of the Faded Ivory layers, and that darkens it a little. • Also, notice that the MERGED PHOTO layer has a Linear Burn blend mode, so if you press Ctrl J (Mac: Cmd J) to duplicate that layer, it will also darken the photo. • I really liked this effect, but then I thought I would try a different action, so I hid all the Faded Ivory layers and ran the Lavender action. • I ended up combining the two actions by making the Faded Ivory layers visible and removing the top Lavender layer. • And finally, I added the Royal Plum Vignette to add the finishing touch.

Page 4 Actions: Enhance Photos Fast © 2015 Linda Sattgast, all rights reserved. Couple • For this photo I ran the Embers action, which gave the photo a nice warm glow. • I liked the effect so much that I duplicated the embers layer and reduced the opacity to 30% for just the right amount of warmth. • And finally I added the Sunshine Vignette.

Two Girls • For this photo I ran the PLAY ALL Duotone Recipes action. • I chose Rich Latte as my starting point. • I added Faded Rose and changed the blend mode to Soft Light. • And finally, I added a Golden Brown vignette.

Use these recipes as is, or you can mix and match them to create entirely new effects.

Page 5 Actions: Enhance Photos Fast © 2015 Linda Sattgast, all rights reserved.