start to finish // twinkly brownie

I know this post is WAY overdue, but I had most of it written out last night when I went to bed, and then my computer updated and rebooted while I was sleeping.

Note to self: always save drafts.

straight out of the camera (sooc)

First thing I did was apply one of my own Lightroom presets called “vintage purple”

My presets aren’t really for sale or give-a-way (maybe one day) but this basically boosted the exposure, added some clarity & vibrance, took away a bit of saturation, and then I used split tones in tan (highlights) & purple (shadows).

Clearly, that made it too bright, so I wanted to work on that a little bit.

I took down the exposure all the way back down to 0 and increased the blacks to 16.

I also jacked up the highlight recovery to do away with the crazy overexposure around the top right corner of the camera.

My shadow saturation (the purple) was actually a little too purple’y, so I took it down quite a bit to make it more of a lavender.

Then, I bumped up the contrast even more.

And cropped it.

Imported that image into Photoshop Elements 5.0 so I could fix it up a little more and add a fun texture.

I immediately added a fill layer of navy blue #0f0f3d and put it into exclusion mode and changed opacity to 80%.

Added another fill layer of pure white #ffffff and changed the opacity to 5%.

Added this texture in overlay mode and changed opacity to 70% and then erased it over the camera (eraser set at 35% opacity).

Then, I copied the background (control-J) and moved that to the top of the layers and set it to soft light blending mode at 80% opacity.

Flattened the layers and TA-DA!

If you have any questions about this tutorial, please post them in the comments and I will reply there. I hope you enjoyed it!

Please add my feed to your rss reader if you are interested in seeing more tutorials like this.