I have grown so much in my understanding of photography & the right lighting in my past 2 years of blogging. Honestly, I look back at old my old photos and cringe.
Together with my Canon t3i (found HERE) & 50 mm 1.8 lens (I bought mine HERE), I think I have finally learned how to take a decent photo. I have recently fallen in love with the soft “peachy” vintage look. Not everyone loves this effect, but I think it looks so romantic! Here is a quick tutorial on how I add “soft light” to my photography in Photoshop.
First you need a nice picture. Try to take it in natural lighting.
To add a extra lighting to your image, use curves.
Drag the line up or down until you get the amount of brightness you want.
To add a vintage “tint” add a solid color in the layer above your curves and original photo.
I like to use the peach color. It especially helps to choose a color tone that already exists in your photo.
Lower the opacity until you can only see a slight hint of color. You can always hide and un-hide the layer (using the eye next to each layer) to see the difference.
If you have hundreds of photos to edit (like I do!) and you want to use the same effect, you can always mass edit the same effect onto the other photos by dragging the effect layers onto the un-edited image. This method works best when the photos were taken with the same subject and/or were taken under the same lighting condition.
You can always quickly adjust the “effect” by double clicking on the layer you want to edit.
So there you have it!
Quite a before and after, right?
I always adjust the curve on my photos, but I didn't know about the solid color thing… I'm opening photoshop right now to try it out! Thanks for sharing.
Let me know how it goes! 🙂
I do this to some of my photos too, practically the same steps used. Pretty nifty effect, right? 🙂
This is such a great idea! I love all your fabulous ideas and tips! I have a quick question about your lovely blog. Do you use Blogger or WordPress and which one would you suggest for someone thinking about starting a blog? 🙂
I use blogger and love it! Idk t have to pay hundreds of dollars for hoasting each year, and even though it's simple, it's super user friendly.
I've heard people swear by WordPress, and maybe I would love that better, but I don't know.
Either way, buy your domain .com from the start- you can always let it expire if you choose not to continue (about $10 per year) but it's so much easier to do that from the start than switch like I did. 🙂
Thanks so much for the advice!
such a wonderful tutorial – i'm just learning how to use photoshop so this is very helpful! thank you!
This is genius! I applied this to my photos and I loved the end result!
I just went to look for the curves and I can't find it on Photoshop Elements 6, do you know where else it might be hidden? Love what it did to your photos, thanks for sharing.
It looks like elements doesn't have the same curves as regular photoshop, but this article here might help you: http://forums.adobe.com/thread/547671?tstart=1
You can achieve a similar result using brightness and contrast (if PE has that option) otherwise, I would check out using a free online program with the curves option and just do that step separately (I'm pretty sure ipiccy has curves, picmonkey does too, but you have to have the paid membership to use it there) hope that helps!
I love the peachy tone ♥
If you have to repeat these steps on several photos (especially hundreds), save some time by creating an action in photoshop and batch process all the images automatically with just a few clicks total 🙂
That's one thing I haven't been able to figure out! How do you create an action to save? Can you even do it in Elements 12? I love this look so much and with all the colors at our disposal, the looks are going to be endless !
@antenucci
You can use CTRL+L to get the curve option.
@hannah, will try that soonest! Great post!
Hi! I just discovered your blog yesterday and I wanted to thank you for how helpful all your posts are! I'm in the beginning stages of starting my own blog and you have been the most helpful source for trendy blogging so far! 🙂
Aww! I'm so glad they are helpful! Have a beautiful day! XO
Beautiful!
This is really great to know, thanks for sharing. I use Inkscape and Pant.NET to edit my photos/images but one day I will splurge on Photoshop. I tihink this would still work in other programs that allow you to add layers though, I will try it!
I love this! It is so pretty!
Thanks for sharing, nice tips and tutorial <3
http://www.sweetlikeapeach.com
I never thought to add a colour layer at a low opacity over an entire photo. I need to try this out. Thanks for the tips.
Nice tutorial! I tried it out immediately and it works great! Thanks!
Hannah, I love your tutorials on Photoshop, Picmonkey and Ipccy. I've only used free PicMonkey but am ready to buy some kind of photo editing software. Which do you recommend to start out that is extremely user friendly and gives me more bang for my buck?
Great tutorial.Thanks so much Hannah.I'm off to do some experimenting