Jan
31

My brother’s wedding and Photoshop Actions

Posted by DeAnna

My brother Brandon got married just over a year ago. I’ve been working on the photos so I can prepare a present for them for their first anniversary (of course it’ll be scrapbooking related). I had a lot of work to do to my photos since we had just gotten our brand new Nikon D80 less than a month earlier, and I hadn’t figured out all the dials and buttons yet. All of the pictures of the ceremony were quite dark since they only had the lights on at the back of the room and over the couple was dark. My standard flash wasn’t strong enough, and I had no idea how to change the ISO yet.

Here’s a straight-out-of-the-camera shot of our family at the wedding:

Here’s how it looks after I’ve run a Pioneer Woman Boost action (and played with Levels a bit to lighten it up):

At any rate, I played with the Levels a bit, and used some really cool actions. The Pioneer Woman is one of my favourite websites, and she has two Photoshop action sets. I used Boost on pretty much all of the photos, and chose several to convert to black and white using PW’s B&W action. I really like the edge burn on the B&W action, but I found it a bit dark for my black and whites, so I usually lessened the opacity on it. On a few of the photos I wanted to keep the colour and make the photos a bit dreamy so I used Lovely & Ethereal. These actions were all from Set#1, but Set#2 has some very cool photo effects in it as well. I particularly like Seventies, Colorized and Sepia Tone.

Here are some of my favourites: