San Diego Children's and Newborn Baby Photographer | Little Sprout Photography

Here’s a neat Photoshop trick I picked up from watching a Marcus Bell tutorial at Adobe TV. By combining a hefty gaussian blur with Photoshop’s blending modes, you can give your images a nice dreamy feel, which worked out really nicely for a few images we took at our friends’ Johnny and Megan’s wedding. Here’s how:

1. Open your image and duplicate the layer (Go to Layer > Duplicate Layer).
2. With your top layer selected, go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. In the example below, I used a radius of 6px because I’m not working with a full resolution file. Select a value high enough to blur out most details in the image.
3. Now, select Edit > Fade Gaussian Blur.
4. In the little popup window, adjust the blending mode to Soft Light. From here you can adjust the strength of the effect by moving the opacity slider down. The example below has an opacity of 50%.

That’s it! It’s a pretty easy way to apply a slightly hazy effect to any image.

NikonD700/50mm 1.4 | 1/80s | f4 | ISO3200

What do you think? If you’ve used this technique, let us know how it worked out for you by posting a comment below.

Pick/Reject
Many times, I’ll end a shoot with dozens (hundreds?) of pictures, which can feel a little overwhelming. After playing with using a star rating system or color-coding my photos, I’ve found the fastest way to sift through the images and quickly sort the keepers from the losers is by using the status flags. Here’s how:

1. Import your images and make sure you’re viewing unflagged images only. This ensures your picks and rejected photos will be automatically removed from the filmstrip upon selection. I find this helps me keep track of images I’ve already addressed.
2. For each image, click P to keep it or X to reject it. I am fairly ruthless at this stage — if an image is out of focus or I don’t like to composition, I will go ahead and reject it. If several images look good, I will use the Compare and Survey views to make sure I’m picking the best image of the bunch.
3. Now switch the flag so you’re viewing rejected photos and delete all of these. No use in wasting space on lackluster images. Once finished, I turn off the status flags so only my picks remain.

I find this simple keep/reject system enables me to quickly sift through large numbers of photos without getting stuck on arbitrary star ratings.

Quick Black & White Check
This one is really easy. From the library or develop modules, select an image and hit the V key. The image will be converted to grayscale. Hit V again to switch back. This is a super easy way to quickly gauge how an image will look in black and white before performing a more thorough conversion.

Quick tip for creating black and white conversions in lightroom: Try sliding the color temperature up to 12000 or so and then desaturating the image. The higher color temperature makes skin appear smooth and creamy, and the funky colors are neutralized by sliding the saturation to zero. From here, you can adjust the Blacks, Brightness, and Contrast sliders to taste…