Overlays 101

By popular demand, here's a little tutorial on overlays- what they do, and a couple of free ones from me to you.

Overlays are basically just images with abstract shapes and colors that you can apply to an image to create a certain effect. In Photoshop CS, Elements, or whatever layering software you use, just select and copy the overlay, paste it on top of the photo you want to apply it to, and change that layer to 'overlay', 'soft light', or 'multiply'. You can change that layer to anything you want, actually, but the best effects are generally achieved through those three layer types. Then just drop the opacity to your desired look, and erase, smudge, or mask it off the sections you don't want it on. Easy peasy! You can use overlays with lots of texture, with warm colors, with different light patterns to achieve different lighting effects. Some of my favorites are by Florabella and Kaleidescope, but you can certainly make your own!

Here's a little subtle before and after using the Sunburst overlay:

and here's the overlay image itself: (feel free to download this image from this link, or you can get three free overlays from the link below)

My 3 free bokeh overlays are here:

http://www.mediafire.com/?n9c4e2tc79zwe 

rock em out, and show me what you come up with!

xoxo,

Stephanie

B and A Day!

Haven't done a B and A in so long! Here's a recent shot of my sister, Sarah, taking a photo with her old Canon 35mm. I'm so excited she's getting into photography- she has such an amazing eye. Plus- I get one more person to talk nerdy photo stuff with! Bonus! :)

So for this one, I used a Florabella action- Gypsy from the Luxe collection. I thought it would really work nicely with the red tones in her hair.

I tweaked the layers, turning off the 'Lighten' layer, since it was so bright to begin with. Turned down the warm tone, brought down the Dull Pop layer, darkened a tad, and flattened it.

Then I sharpened the image using MCP's High Definition action. MCP has both a high def sharpening action for full-size images and an action that re-sizes images and sharpens them for the web- both free by the way. I have found that for me, I prefer to run the High Def sharpen action on the full-size image, then run the Web-resizing action, and just turn the sharpening layer off. It seems to be clearer and less grainy when I do it that way.

The results aren't super dramatic, but gives the image just enough 'Ooomph'.

CLICK TO ENLARGE:

P.S.- This was taken at with my 35mm 1.8- which hasn't left my camera since I got it.

http://intuitiveimagesphotography.com/

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.