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Hi. This is Joshua from Greater Than Gatsby. Today, we're going to be working with our
newest action set, 'The Carving Tree Collection'. This is our most innovative set to date and
it contains 140 different actions. The image that I chose to work with today is one
that I used on the Facebook page as just an example of a shallow depth of field, but it
was so well received and so many people wanted to know how to achieve that type of look,
I decided to go ahead and make a tutorial of it.
I'm going to start off by doing just a little bit of retouch. I'm going to go ahead and
run the natural skin smoother. I'm not going to do a whole lot of retouch. I'm just going
to even out her skin tone. Since this has a black layer mask, you want to make sure
that your foreground color is set to white, and that you grab the brush tool. I'm going
to go ahead and make this a little smaller. At a medium opacity, I'm just going to paint
over some of the areas of the face.
I'm going to avoid her cheeks with all the freckles. That's a detail we really don't
want to lose. I'm just going to paint a little here and there. Okay. Next, we're
going to run the iris sparkle. Now, this action, you want to make sure you don't get on the
eye whites themselves, only the iris. We select the brush tool and make this a little smaller.
As you can see, it just gives a little gleam to the eye and enhances the catch lights.
Go ahead and put it over here.
Like I said, this example was from a very shallow depth of field. My aperture was actually
set to 1.2. You can see that one eye is in focus, while one eye is not. You go back up
here to the natural skin smoother. I missed a little area up here. Okay.
My next action is going to be whiten the eye whites. I'm going to zoom in a little closer
for this. You want to make sure that you only get it on the whites of the eye. Now, this
looks a little strong so I'm going to back off this action with the opacity slider once
I finish painting it on. Slide over here to her other eye. All right. We'll zoom back
out. Okay. That's still a little light, so I'm going to reduce the opacity just
a little bit to where it looks a little more natural. Okay.
All right. Now that retouch is complete, I'm going to go ahead and flatten this image and
run clean edit color base. Now, that looks a little bright, so we're going to back
this opacity down as well. As you can see, since this is a very blurry background, we
get a few distortion lines in here, so I'm going to scroll down and run another action
with this one. Soft [dreamy 00:03:37] blur. Go ahead and click 'Play'.
As you can see, it blurred everything out. We can still see these gradient lines a little
bit, so I'm going to go ahead and make it really blurry. Okay. Now this action made
the whole image blurry, so we want to use the white layer mask to add the detail back
into her face. With the white layer mask selected, I'm going to switch my foreground color
to black, get my brush tool. Make this a lot larger. We want all the details back in her
face, so we're going to take the opacity all the way up to 100. We're just going
to add all that detail back in. Make sure we don't miss anything.
Now, you can see that around here, her hair is still a little blurry. I like that effect,
but I'm going to reduce the opacity of the brush, and we're going to bring some of
that back in. This action is perfect for hiding flyaways. You can see that these ... make
this small. You can see that these little hairs right here have almost completely disappeared.
This is something that I like to use to help treat that.
I like the way that's looking, so I'm going to go ahead and once again flatten my
image. Now, we're going to do a few of the artistic enhancements. Before I do that, I
want to add some haze to the background. It's a little flat right now. It's a lot of green
and it's got this big, purplish grey bar over here. I want to get rid of that.
One of the newest features to this set is what we call, 'Sunbursts' or sunlight
bursts. I'm going to go ahead and show you exactly how to use these. These are perfect
to add haze around your subject. As you can see, I basically just put a big, purple splash
of light right in the middle of her face. We want to click 'Continue'.
Now, you can drag this haze all the way over at the side. We want just a little bit out
there, so we'll leave it right here and click 'Okay'. Now, I'm going to lower
this opacity just a little bit. There we go. We'll put it right there. Okay.
Next, let's go ahead and grab bright golden burst, and once again, big light burst right
in the middle of her face. We're going to drag this up to the top and treat it like
sunlight. I think it looks good right there. Click 'Okay'. Now, that's a little bit
too much on her hair, so I'm going to use the layer mask, and go ahead and brush some
of this off. I'll lower the opacity of the brush. We'll just kind of take it off of
her face, leave a little in her hairline. Maybe we'll increase the opacity just a
little bit.
I like the way that that looks on the side. Now, we're going to go ahead and see if
we can hide this grey bar that's on the edge of our picture. I'm going to go ahead
and grab a bright colorless burst. Click 'Okay', and we'll move this one off to the side.
We'll leave it right there. We really want to lower the opacity of this one. There we
go. I think that looks good.
Now, we're going to run one more of these. Let's go ahead and do a bright cool burst.
We'll put this one down here in the other corner. All right. I'm liking the way that
looks. Now, I want to keep a lot of this off her face. With the layer mask selected, I'm
going to go ahead and brush a lot of this out. Brushed a little too much off up here,
so add that back in. You don't want to leave any halos. Okay. I'm liking the way this
looks but the opacity still just a little too much. There we go.
Now, that's a lot of light haze around her. We want to add a little color in. I'm actually
going to go up to the sunshine brushes that we've got up here, and I'm going to select
bright pink haze. With the black layer mask selected, we're going to make sure our foreground
color is set to white. I'm just going to make my brush really big and just add a couple
pops of it. A little bit more up here. We'll lower the opacity back down. This corner still
needs a little something so we'll go ahead and add soft pink light. We'll just place
a pop down there in the corner, and once again lower the opacity.
Now, this is a very light image. It's almost too light right now. I'm going to run one
of the finishing touch actions that's called 'Dark grey forest'. Now, as you can see,
that really darkened the image. It gave it a matte effect, but we're going to want
to brush a lot of that off her face. We'll start by lowering the opacity of this action.
Bring it down. I like it at 15%. We're going to get a lot of this off of her face. It would
help if I set my foreground color to black. Just slowly paint it off. Make it a little
less. Okay.
I see that she's got a few dark circles under her eyes, so I'm going to come down
here to lighten the image. Now, this lighten the whole image but it didn't give us quite
the fill-flash effect that we want. Now, I'm going to scroll down a little bit more and
click 'Add light'. Now, this is a brush. You can come in here and just add puffs of
color or puffs of light, excuse me. We'll keep the opacity low. We'll put it at 18.
I'm just going to come in here, spray a little light. You can see the before and the
after.
Now, this image still looks really light, so we're going to come in here and click
on one of the other quick helpers which is the 'Auto Histogram Fix'. It's building
us a histogram. Okay. Now, everything is a little bit darker. I'm going to take this
and back it off. It added a little too much around her eyes, so actually we'll remove
some of it. You see the before and the after of the histogram fix. I like what it did for
her face but I don't like what it did for the background. I'm going to raise the opacity
and we're just going to brush it off over here. We'll keep that looking a little more
subtle.
Now, the last thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to warm it up just a little
bit. I'm going to go up to the artistic enhancing brushes and select 'Champagne'.
Now, that made it really warm so we're really going to lower this opacity. I want her to
have a nice golden skin tone.
That's it. We created our nice, soft, hazy image. We've got pastel colors around her.
It gives it a really cool effect. Now, this may not be everybody's taste but it's
something unique. I wanted to show off a lot of the new actions in the set. This is more
actions and I would probably put in to a typical edit. I wanted to give you a good feel for
what the set can actually do.
We've already flattened a few times, so I'm going to show you the before and after
view of the history panel. We've got the before and the after. The before and the after.
You can check out all of our action sets at 'Greaterthangatsby.com'. I just want to
thank you guys for taking the time to watch our tutorial, and email me if you have any
questions at info@greaterthangatsby.com.