I love playing around with my images in PhotoShop.  There are a few photographers out there, though, who are way beyond playing and are pretty serious about PhotoShop.  Doug Boutwell is one of those photographers, and he’s got some mean PhotoShop skills.

If you have not seen the award-winning images of Boutwell Studios, you need to take a cyber stroll and visit. Doug’s ability for creating kick-ass Photoshop actions is uncanny, and they will kick your images up a notch.  You can simply apply the action, or you can apply a few together to create your own looks. The Totally Rad Action sets help you create dramatic looks that you can mix and match together to create your own style.

Click here if you want to purchase them for yourself.

This image is from Julie & Yas’ wedding at the Walt Disney Concert Hall.

My thought process:

When I first saw Julie’s colors (red tones) I was excited because I knew there was a red wall in the parking lot level of the Walt Disney Concert Hall where she was getting married. For this image, I asked them to hold hands and look at me. I wanted them to simply stand quietly together because I was trying to capture something that might evoke feelings of a vintage wedding image like this one:

How I shot it:

I was shooting in RAW with my Canon 5D and my new 50mm 1.2 lens. This image was shot in manual mode at 1/80, f 1.6, ISO 500.

Because it was rather dark down there, I used my Speedlite Transmitter ST-E2 and had Shannon hold my 580 EX flash to light them. She was off to my side on a short staircase at about a 45 degree angle to the couple, and she held the light above her head pointed down at them.

My post-processing:

I used my own custom preset, “jb bluesy”, to process the RAW file in Bridge and then applied Kevin Kubota’s action, “The Look” to the jpg. I used The Boutwell’s Totally Rad Action, “Yin/Yang” to get some of the detail back in Julie’s dress and to pop a tiny bit of light back into their eyes. I then applied Jesh De Rox’s Fine Art Texture, “He Loved Her Italian Accent” to create the velvet wallpaper look in the background. The last thing I did was add an 85 warming filter set at 25% and remove the shadow behind Yas in Photoshop.

Wah lah!!

before (straight out of camera)

after