Hi tamara,

First of all thanks for you very enlightening blog, I am following it with great detail as I am learning a lot. I too love your Isla with the baby mum mums storyborad. The colors are amazing, but I don´t know much about layers to follow the recipe that you have posted today. Could you elaborate a little bit more on how you manage to edit your pictures so that they have that very warm finish? I would appreciate a comparison between working with white balance casts vs using layers s you finally did in your storyboard.
BTW, Isla is so cute!

Thanks a lot

Berta

Thanks about Isla! I’m smitten, in case anyone can’t tell, so I’m pretty biased…

I’m happy to share! There are lots of ways you can manipulate a photo in post production to achieve a completely different tone than what was shot but… who has time?! Especially over some mum mums?!

There are two ways I like to guide the colour and tone of a photo quickly and easily, when I’m not up for investing oodles of time. Settle in and fair warning; there are quite a few examples. 

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One of the easiest ways to cast alternate tones on your photos with a DSLR is by addressing the white balance setting. White balance is as it sounds, and its job is to find the most basic and true grey in a photo so the camera knows how to capture the remaining colours.

Moms, remember those make-up mirrors that plugged in? The ones with lights on both sides and you could change the light settings between daytime, office lights, nighttime, etc.? Similar concept. A camera can have the exact same settings, and yet a photo will look completely different if one moment it’s bright and sunny and the next its overcast and raining. 

What do I do? I mostly shoot in RAW because I have the software to process it quickly on my desktop, and keep the camera in ‘auto’ white balance. I can then alter the white balance in post-production using Lightroom. But that’s just my habit; you can also control these white balance settings on your camera. Just remember to change them every time the environmental light changes! 

These are all the same image: 1/125 @ f/3.5, ISO 400, Auto WB. 

Still with me?! 

Two quick things: Lightroom’s ‘auto’ white balance is separate to that of your camera. And ‘flash’ white balance isn’t reliant on a flash actually firing. No flash was used for this photo, just the light from the living room window. 

As you can see, this slight adjustment makes the world of difference. As always, I encourage you to play around with your own DSLR in your prime environments. You’ll start to know what setting you love for use in your home or favourite park at a certain time of day. I just can’t emphasize enough that, if you go off ‘auto’, remember to change it for a new environment! You don’t want tungsten on while you’re at the park on a nice day, and so on. 

•••••

Now, layers. Who’s still here?!

For colour casting, I sometimes do tinted layers in Photoshop (any version). This is another quick n’ easy way to alter the tone of a photo without too much of a time investment. I create a new layer, and use the paint bucket to fill in usually a pale yellow, pale pink or pale peach colour before playing with the opacity and merging.

Huh-wha? I know. But it’s really easy, once you’ve done it a few times.

Go to Layers, New. Then select your paint bucket and fill in a colour. Yellow? Start with #F9E98C. Pink? Try #E68A73. For a neutral blend, you can experiment with #F6D986.

These aren’t hard and fast recipes so definitely experiment, and sometimes I mix them up by using a few tints (see below), straying from these colour codes and changing opacities of the tints (start with 25% and go from there). Another way to subtly change the image is to change the way the layers step onto each other from the drop-down menu in your layers window. Since these are all built on top of the original, you can see here how ‘colour burn’ is much sharper and deeper than ‘soft light’, and so on. It’s all a matter of taste. 

I really like the colours you used in the storyboards of Isla with the baby mum mums. Do you use photoshop and if so do you use any actions? Sorry if you have received a similar question.

Thanks! 

I use Lightroom, Photoshop and Picassa or Picnik even. I can be all over the place! Lately, I’ve been shooting in RAW for the DSLR with my white balance set to ‘auto’, importing into Lightroom and playing with the various white balance casts there. I’ve also been using tint overlays in Photoshop and adjusting the opacity; the baby mum mum spread was a rose and a lemon coloured layer set to about 15% opacity and dissolved. 

As for actions, I love them for landscapes and city shots (DeviantArt has some cool free ones) but find them really harsh for baby/kid skin so it’s mostly going in and hand adjusting contrast and highlights these days, which can also be done in most other photo editing plug-ins. A little gaussian blur never hurts either!