The secret of KJ’sprocessing! Ö

-an extensive tutorial

OK, so since several of you have asked me to share my processing secretswith you, I will.First, I open the photo in Lightroom:I then right click it and open it in Photoshop, as a .TIFF-file (since I’m aperfectionist, this keeps my quality from degrading as I process, re-process and edit my re-processed photo). Then comes the fun part:

A lot of my work is done in Curves (RGB), and my diagrams usually take onsimilar shapes (even if the strength varies).For this particular series, I started out pulling up the brightness, whilekeeping the very darkest tones (in this case her hair) at the same level orslightly darker. (Remember, most these photos were darker than I wantedthem to be - partially because of my poor exposure skills, partially becauseNorway has literally no light in December and partially because I wasafraid the highlights would be blown out, andwanted to be able to control them carefully.I’m sure you rock at exposure though, so youwon’t need to keep that in mind.

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)I then went to the red – R – part of Curves, andpulled it slightly up from a point somewherein the middle (you know what I mean,right?), just to bring out the warm, red tonein her cheeks and lips. The greens – G – Iwas also careful with, pulling the line slightlydown to the right on the lower half, makingthe shadows more magenta, and theopposite on the other half (making the highlights greener). (Move itaround ‘till you get a result that doesn’t look too horrible, but rememberthat you can’t do all the colors at once, so it’s hard to see what it’s goingto look like in the next minute.) As for the blues – B – I went to the topright corner and dragged the line slightly down along the right side,making the highlights yellower. I then placed another point closer to themiddle, and a third point on the lower half of the curve, making shadowsbluer. If done right, this makes your tones softer, smoother and dreamier.OK, great. Now I had a nice, wintery photo, but it’s still really boring. I’dbeen hoping to use some nice yellowy stray light on this shoot, but it wascloudy and the sun didn’t really show.So, after a few minutes of thinking about what to do, I tried painting onsome random color, and bingo - interesting shot right away!I started out with painting on some white on a new layer, with a soft brush just large enough to look natural without covering her face. (Make sureyou choose the places where the light would naturally come in – usuallyfrom the top or side.) The opacity was 100% and blend mode Normal.When happy with the shape, I changed the blend mode to Screen andlowered the opacity. I then picked up the eraser (where I chose to set theopacity down to around 20%) and removed the parts that looked unnaturalor too much. Then, opening another layer, I painted on yellow on top of the white and set that to Screen or Overlay, depending. The next layer Iused was a bright, warm orange gradient, covering the same areas thatwe already painted. (If you’ve painted places that aren’t ease to coverusing a gradient, just use the brush tool as shown earlier.) Set this layer tosomeone like 60-80% and Overlay.Remember, you’re gonna have to play around a lot with the blend modes,order of the layers and opacities to get it just right, and keep erasing the