Editing indoor natural light studio shots using Photoshop Actions

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Editing indoor natural light studio shots using Photoshop Actions

September 17, 2010 | 3 Comments |Add a comment

Thanks to Karen Gunton of Smile, Play, Love Photography in Australia, for sending in this Blueprint.

Karen wrote: Here is a photo from a recent studio session. Even with a huge window, because I use natural light for my studio shots, my backdrop always comes out grey. I use MCP actions “bright white spell” to get my backdrop nice and white, which I think makes it look more professional and suits my clean, modern style. here are my steps for this complete photo edit:

Did a white balance adjustment in RAW – then opened the photo in Photoshop
Used Noiseware to reduce noise at default settings (using natural light means I set my ISO quite high, so I love the ease and excellent results of the Noiseware plug-in – which I heard about on the MCP actions blog, by the way!)
Used the MCP “bright white spell” from the Bag of Tricks Photoshop action set – changed opacity to 75%.
Did a defog using unsharp mask – set to 14, 40, 0.
Used the MCP actions Eye Doctor Photoshop action to enhance eyes. I only needed the sharpening step on her eyelashes and also used on her lips, set at 50%
Did a few custom curves to increase the midtones and to add slight contrast

After my editing was complete, I saved the image as a TIFF file with the layers intact so that I could go back and tweak it if necessary. Then I flatten the image and run it through an action to resize and sharpen my image for viewing online, as well as adding my logo and a bar. I love that my photos are not just watermarked, they clearly match the brand I use in every interaction with my clients. MCP’s Finish It set inspired me to do this for my images.