A quick pro editing look

I do a lot of reading and following of different blogs and such.  When I find something interesting I start trying it out, and sometimes it works amazingly for my style and sometimes I am personally not a fan.  A while back, I stumbled across a blog with a quick 2 step editing trick that this photographer uses all the time.  I decided to try it, and my pictures were turning out awesome, but they were missing what I felt like was "my touch".  I have been using this technique as a base to start on since I am very happy with the way it looks, but I have also developed a few additions to it.  I thought I would take some time to go through step by step (which is only a few steps in PS)  of this awesome technique that I found!

I personally do a little pre editing when I open up my raw file (but if you are using jpeg this isn't an option for you).  This step isn't required, but if you shoot in raw it's very helpful!

Once my picture is open I look and see if I need to do any cloning or removal of any kind.  (With the photo that I'm using I've already completed this step if it was even necessary)

Here is my starting picture!

(Oh and for those of you who follow me on a regular basis yes I upgraded to a mac!  I'm so extremely excited about it!)

So from here (which we have only opened the image so far)  I will do a simple s-curve on this image (this is step 1 of the 2 step editing technique)

You can see here that I didn't have to do much of an s-curse since I was pretty happy with the original image, but I did want to make some of my shadows darker and bring up some of my lights just a tad.  My histogram of my original image is very spread out and kind of flat.  You can see that it is roughly the same all the way across.

The next step is the one that I had not tried before (or had not discovered the magical setting in it, and I mean this setting has worked with every picture).  Now we will use channel mixer, change it to monochrome.  Once you do this change red to 25, green to 35, and blue to 45 (I have played with different settings and the blog I read this from has already found the secret settings as I haven't found one I like better than these)

This concludes the 2step editing technique I discovered.  You can already see a huge improvement of the image from the original to this one.  I will place them side by side for you to see the difference.

While I do like this image, it's not "my style"  so I did a few extra tweaks to it.  I will tell what I did, but I am going to have to keep part of it secret since it's "my style"

The next step I did was I chose gradient map and I chose a secret color combo that I have started using for the majority of my images.  I set it to multiply and turned down the opacity to 40.  This color combo gave the image a little more of a warming tone.

My next step is another gradient map of a different color combo that I use to get my vintage tones (sorry this color combo is staying secret also).  Now depending on how much of a vintage feel I want will depend on what I set it to.  For this image I set it to screen and dropped it down to 30 opacity (sometimes I'll set it to soft light or I play around with my opacity levels.  I have also used this one on multiply too but that's a little more rare with this gradient map color combo)

Now sometimes I will stop here because I do like this image, but I want to do the artistic look to this and do a matte finish on it.

These next steps are just one of the ways I do a matte finish. I start with levels and get my blacks and shadows set the way I like them.

I didn't have to change my levels much since this image was already close to what I like, so I just moved my black levels over a tad.

Finally for the matte look I use curves and put markers on the line so that I can move just the small parts I want to, and I move my black (and in this image the next marker too) until I get the desired look.  I don't have an exact number to share since this step varies depending on the image.

And now this image has a little more of my touch to it!  Finally I sharpen my images by merging my layers (or just hit command,alt,shift, e) I go to filter-other-high pass.  I choose my level (most of the time I stay with 4 or 5) then I change my layer from normal to overlay.

And I'm done!  I know my added steps make this a little more complicated, but I love the base that the 2step edit start me with.  You can see the difference in the base I use with that to my final!  Here are the original, the 2 step edit, and the final edit with my style added to it.

I hope you find this tutorial helpful!  I love finding great tips and tutorials online.  When I find something great I am happy to share it with others.