By Linda Sattgast Actions: Enhance Photos Fast! & , Sepia, and Duotone Actions—Photoshop Lesson 01: Black & White Actions Class Photo: dad-and-lad.jpg The Enhance Photos- 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. Remember, you can open the action folder and 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 . 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 - 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 /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 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. 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 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 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 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- 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 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 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 Channel Mixer dialog box comes up, adjust the sliders to create the effect you want. You’ll be balancing the Red and Green sliders with the Blue slider. Red and Green will generally be + (plus) values and Blue will be a – (minus) value. The more you go to the left with the Blue, the further you’ll need to go to the right with the Red and Green to compensate. • For this photo, the default settings make the sky quite dark, so make it lighter by moving the Blue slider to the right. I used a value of -46. • Now adjust the Red and Green sliders. The further you go to the right, the more blown out the lighter areas become, so it’s kind of a balancing act. You may end up going back and forth between adjusting the Blue slider vs the Red and Green. For this photo I used +73 for Red and +78 for Green. • When you click OK, the action creates a folder with all the layers. If you open the folder, you’ll see a Sharpen layer, then the Channel Mixer adjustment layer, and finally, a layer on top called Shadow/Highlights Adjustment. I in- cluded the Shadows/Highlights Adjustment layer because there are often dark areas that would look better if they were lighter. The opacity of this layer is only 30%, so you can make the shadows even lighter if you wish by increas- ing the opacity. I left it at 30%. If you don’t need this layer, you can hide it by clicking on the Visibility icon, or you can simply delete it. Practice the Ansel Adams Effect—Photo 2 Class Photo: desert-tree.jpg The Channel Mixer values I used are: Red +96 Green +39 Blue -46 (Ansel Adams Effect—Photo 3 had no class 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 . A lower opacity results in a cool and very light brown. 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.

Page 3 Actions: Enhance Photos Fast © 2015 Linda Sattgast, all rights reserved. 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 rights to these photos.) Horse • With this photo I started by running the PLAY ALL Duotone Recipes action and ended up keeping two, Faded Ivory and Lavender and adjusting them. • With Faded Ivory, if the effect is too light, you can hide one of the Faded Ivory layers, and that will darken it a little. Also, the top layer Merged Photo layer is set to Linear Burn, so if you duplicate that layer by pressing Ctrl J (Mac: Cmd J), it darkens the image. • I added the Lavender duotone recipe on top of Faded Ivory and loved the fairy tale feel of it. Again, though, it was a little too strong, so I hid one of the Lavender layers. • And finally, I added the Royal Plum Vignette to add the finishing touch.

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.

Page 4 Actions: Enhance Photos Fast © 2015 Linda Sattgast, all rights reserved. Two Girls • For this photo I started with Faded Ivory. Again, it was too light, so I hid the second Faded Ivory layer, and duplicated the Merged Photo layer. • Then I added the Touch of Toffee action and simply reduced the opacity of the entire folder to 50% to retain some of that light color from the Faded Ivory. • 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.