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Pastel Edits: Guest Edit with Blooming Dahlia Photography

We are super lucky to welcome Inspawration Alumni Blooming Dahlia Photography to come be a guest artist and share her Pastel Editing process with us!

Anne-Laurie takes us through pretty much her entire workflow (aside from flipping the dog, which I will make an editing toolbox for), showing us how she:

  • Makes one layer for the background, and above that, a layer where just the dog is visible, allowing her to work separately and quickly on each separate part of the image
  • Using linear gradients in camera raw, knowing the subject won’t be affected (due to the above point)
  • Shapes the light onto the dog when it was coming from the opposite direction
  • Adds texture to the sky using a sky replacement + tips on getting skies you can use even in competitions
  • Adding warmth and pink/magenta tones
  • Adding vignettes but keeping the pastel look by pulling up blacks or using levels layers with the blacks pulled up
  • Creating masks with soft edges using a selection tool, then doing Filter > Blur > Gaussian blur on the mask itself, to blur the edges of the mask
  • Fixing up colour casts
  • Using several gradient maps to add colour AND vignette
  • Using a solid colour layer to add a soft pink vignette
  • Using several blend-modes to achieve different effects

Mountain Sunshine

In this tutorial I wanted to create an image that would match a similar one I had of Journey, so I could print them both out for my wall. Therefore, I had quite a specific look in mind, which was: late sun flare through the mountain gap, dawn/dusk time.

In this tutorial we will be:

  • Working on brightening Loki up
  • Bringing texture and detail back into the clouds
  • Adding the fake sun flare overlay
  • Discussing how to keep light natural both with the fake sun and with this open landscape scene
  • Adding some fake rim-light around Loki’s ears to keep the light natural
  • Changing the colour balance to tint everything gold and slightly magenta
  • Removing bits of grass
  • And the normal process of dodge & burn, removing colour-casts from his chest and so on.
DSC04822-2 Taken at f/2.8 with a 24mm lens.