Blueprint: The Girl Wants a Date…

When I visited Atlanta, my hometown, around New Years, I had a blast taking photos of my nieces and nephew. I also had the opportunity to take a some photos of my sister, who is 26. She is 12 years younger than me… so you do the math. We were having so much fun, and I kept hearing about her best friend Jen, who is trying to meet the “man of her dreams.”

I offered to photograph her for fun.  She came over and we had very little good light left as the sun was starting to go down.  I had to work fast. My goal was to come out with a few photos she could use on dating services. I have a 100% success rate with pictures for dating photos. I should add that the “one” and “only” person I did this for prior married the person she met on JDate.com with the photo I shot and edited.

Anyway, here’s Jen.  The 1st shot is straight out of camera, the second is edited in color, the third converted to black and white.

Details on the edit and which MCP Photoshop actions were used:

1. I started by running Crackle from the Quickie Collection.
2. Next I ran the Color Burst action from the Complete Workflow Set. I kept all layers at the default opacity.
3. I noticed that her skin was too pinkish (a result of too much blue/not enough yellow. So I used the Magic See-Saw action from the Bag of Tricks action set. I used yellow up/blue down. The teeth got too yellow, so I masked them back.
4. I wanted to enhance the eyes, so I ran the Eye Doctor action.  I used the Catchlight layer and Sharp as a Tack.
5. Lastly I wanted to lightly smooth her skin.  Her skin was already really nice so I used Magic Powder from the Magic Skin action set at 40% opacity.
6. The steps above achieved the color edit. For most black and white images, I fully edit in color.  Then I use Vanilla Ice Cream from the Quickie Collection on top. That is exactly what I did here as well.  I love the simplicity of the black and white here.

Here are a few other photos we took in the shoot.

Jodi Friedman, MCP Actions

Jodi Friedman is the founder of MCP Actions. She designs popular Photoshop actions and teaches Photoshop to photographers across the globe.

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