Hi welcome, we’re going to show you a couple of cool techniques that I’ve been playing around with. There’s just some cool looks that I’ve been trying to experiment with as far as high cue shots are concerned and I just want to tell you a little story about this image here. This little girl I have photographed her mom and dad’s three years ago which is also something that happens a lot in my studio, got a lot of repeat clients and that’s a good thing but what’s really important about this particular little girl is that the mom and dad just opened up a high-end children’s furniture store in a great high visibility mall and a great area in our city. So this was the twelve-month session of the baby’s first year wall panel and I had proposed a few ideas to the mom and I showed her what I’m going to show you and that is some really cool, new effects, particularly with high key images which this one is and I’m sure you could probably do a variation with low key images or anything about nature with other images but my initial plot was high key.

Now let me just show you what I’m going to do, when I’m working my images to show as proof in the studio I have an action and on my keyboard it’s F6 and as you can see here from the history palette, it’s nothing more than increasing the saturation to +15. This is the defog, this is auto contrast, this is fade auto contrast just to bring it back a little bit and it sharpens it a little bit and adds a little bit of noise. It’s just a quick and dirty workflow. It’s not our main workflow that we use on our final images that go to final output to the lab. It’s just to show our clients when we’re selling.

Now the next thing I’m going to do and I have an action for this but I’m going to show to show the step-by-step method, that is I’m going to duplicate the layer, go to the top layer, go to screen mode and as you can tell it lightens up the image quite a bit. Now you can go in there and decrease that a little bit if you want. Now we’re going to go to flatten image.

Now the next step, I’m going to fire up Contrasoft. Now the Contrasoft, as it comes from your Novias bundle could be a little bit different than what I’m going to show you because I’ve modified mine. I’ve taken up those popup menus to save time and I’ve set the setting so that when I fire it, that’s what I get and it doesn’t really allow me a variation or it doesn’t remind me of any of these steps but I can go in to the layers and adjust because I know that and I’ve become very familiar with the Contrasoft which is one of my favorite actions.

Let me show you the final products because what I’ve done was I’ve taken a crop tool and I crop that square and this is what I showed herm, look at that cool, unusual cropping. I put a little pinstripe of which I have taken with my color picker from the little girls top and then I put a white canvass all around it, very, very simple. When I showed this to the mom, she got very excited and I said this is a style of photography I would like to highlight in your store and of course we can start with your little girl and so she’s in, I mean I’m going to end up with a priceless display and she’s already excited because she’s seen the proof in the putting, it took me, literally 10 seconds to produce this sample image to show her, okay? That’s a low resolution proof, and remember, like I reminded you this is just for selling. However the idea is what gets across and as you can see this very different, very unusual, you know, the square and we got the cropping off to the side here, a lot of grandparents would probably be offended by that. However, you know, I always preemptively tell my clients, you know if you like it, trust your heart, trust your first reaction, don’t over analyze, don’t use your left brain, analytical brain to make a final decision on this. If you like it instantly that’s your heart speaking so anyways that’s the look I’m talking about and that’s really all it is, it’s just duplicate that layer and run me a Contrasoft and try something unusual cropping so anyway I hope you enjoyed that and you can see some of the other images in the post which show you before and afters to get that point across. Thank you.