Note: There are lots of printing companies but I just used the three biggest ones for my location {Europe}. I didn’t realize that Photobox isn’t available in the USA. It’s kind of equivalent to Snapfish which Americans use quite a lot.

{BUILDING}

Building the three books took completely different turns. I didn’t utilize the built-in templates from any of the companies. Instead, I used this album template from Vol25 in Photoshop and uploaded the pages.

Photobox has so many different book options and ideas

Apple – With Apple, you have to have iPhoto which means that you have to be on an Apple computer. Once you import the photos you want to use into iPhoto {or you import the JPGS of the album pages you made in Photoshop like I did} then you can build your book in just a few clicks. You just highlight all the images you want to use in your book, click ‘book’ and it guides you through the whole process. A few things I noted:

• Apple has loads of really great themes all ready for you to just pop your photos in. All of the book companies do, but in browsing through, theirs appealed to me more.
• Building a book was very easy and enjoyable
• …however as you can see here there are very few size and cover options.

Photobox – Building a book with Photobox takes place all online. They don’t have any software you can download so you have to first upload all of your files into an album and then build your book. This takes a lot of time, but with the other methods of book building described above, the uploading takes place at the end. So either way, you’re waiting for an upload at some point in the process. Of the three, I found Photobox to be the most time consuming to figure out. However, the biggest benefit with working with Photobox was that I could pop the whole two-page spread I’d made in Photoshop into the book at once. Whereas with the others, I had to insert each page separately. Other things I noted:

• There didn’t seem to be any reasonable way in which the image files organized themselves when I wanted to drag them into the book. So the pages were jumbled and not in the order I wanted them in.
• On that note, I wanted to double-click on the files so I could see them bigger to read the text and verify that it was the one I wanted to use. Because I couldn’t view the files larger while building, I had to keep toggling back to my Photoshop in order to view the images large enough to read the text.

All the options from Blurb for building your book

Blurb – Blurb gives you quite a few methods by which you can build your book. From tools for the beginner {I would recommend downloading their Book Smart program} to the super technical Adobe InDesign option, Blurb has many many ways to create a book. You can even make a book with Blurb from within Lightroom 3 and Ligitroom 4 beta! Far out! Some of the things I noted when building my book with Blurb were:

• They have many awesome book size and orientation options. I went for a more bookish shape with Blurb where the other two were more like photo albums
• Built-in copyright page at the beginning of your book {which you can remove if you want}
• Of the three methods, Blurb had the clearest guides
• Blurb had an undo button for when I made a mistake!

{PRICE}

The books were 52 pages.

Apple – The Apple book cost £50. Regular paper. I didn’t remove the adorable Apple logo. Who’d wanna do that? :)

Photobox – And with Photobox, the book was £61.47. With Photobox, you often get BOGO deals and so I also got one for free! I added matte premium paper and paid a couple pounds extra to remove their logo. Photobox also accepts PayPal – yayy!

Blurb – With Blurb, it was £34.83. Regular paper. Logo stayed put. Blurb also accepts PayPal which is very convenient for me.

{FRONT COVER}

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So now to how the book looks.

Apple – the Apple book came with a dust jacket and matching printing on the book itself which I thought was a wonderful element. The printing doesn’t wrap all the way around the spine, but it looks like it does from the front.

Photobox – The Photobox cover stops before it gets to the spine which is a bit off putting.

Blurb – The Blurb cover I chose was image wrap, although it doesn’t exactly wrap. It, too, stops at the spine and then continues at the back. But it still looks fab from the front.

{BACK COVER}

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The back cover of my book is very important to me. It’s the last impression a reader has and I think sets the tone for how they remember your book.

Apple – The back cover of the Apple book had to be blank. Boo! The only option they had was to place an image in the center of the back, but there wasn’t an option to have the whole thing accommodate my back page template. So I chose to leave it blank.

Photobox – The back cover options with Photobox were much the same as with Apple. There were no whole page full-bleed options to just pop in your whole back page image. As you can see, it kind of stops near the bottom where the huge PhotoBox logo is supposed to be, but I paid extra to have that removed.

Blurb – Yayy! Blurb let me put whatever I wanted onto the back so I got to use the actual back cover file I’d created to match my book.

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{INSIDE PAGES}

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Well this is the most important part to me – how the images actually look. In the comparison to the right, you can see that…

Apple – The the image printed by Apple had all the moody contrast that it was meant to have. The shadows were exactly right, nothing weird going on there.

Photobox – I don’t know what they’re thinking here. When I do a print comparison between Photobox and anyone else, Photobox always {sadly} loses. The highlights are blown, there’s no contrast, the shadows are lost. It’s harsh. Triple yuck.

Blurb – Nothing strange with the Blurb printing that I could tell. Much like that of Apple. A tiny bit brighter, but not to its detriment.

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{SPINE/BINDING}

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I think that the binding is the main place that gives away a book’s quality {or lack thereof}. I’m always judging a book by its spine!

Apple – The Apple spine and binding were very good quality. Very much like an actual hardcover book store book. There’s some stitching, but on closer inspection, the pages are still glued in. Not sure what the stitches are for.

Photobox – I’m not sure why I photographed the Photobox one closed. Maybe I couldn’t keep it open? Anyway, I thought it was pretty good for a glued-in binding. I don’t know if ‘glued-in’ is the proper term for it, but there wasn’t any stitching to be seen. It was very nice and, again, like a proper bookstore book.

Blurb – Although this one is also glued in, I found it appeared to be the cheapest. It was a bit wobbly within the cover itself as if the cover would have liked for there to be more pages in it? I didn’t really like it.

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{AUTHOR PAGE}

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It was really important to me that I get to put in information about the author – me! This makes it feel like a real book and allows me to put my face to the project.

Apple – I love how Apple let me put the author page on the dust jacket. Made me feel like a proper author!

Photobox – There wasn’t an option for this like with Apple, so I just made the file in Photoshop and popped it onto the first page.

Blurb – Likewise, I popped the Photoshop file onto the last page along with my branding on the opposite page.

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{BRANDING}

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Sometimes you don’t mind a brand making its appearance on your project. And sometimes you do. All the companies give you the option of removing it for a nominal fee {Apple doesn’t charge to remove}.

Apple – Apple has a cult following. It’s a status symbol. I think people might print through them purely because it’s another place to plaster their logo into their lives! And I love that it says “made on a MAC”. So naturally, I left it there.

Photobox – the Photobox logo was supposed to be on the back and quite large and obtrusive. So I paid to have it removed and place my own on the back cover instead.

Blurb – the Blurb logo was little and I think it’s actually quite nice. And being that they’re one of the new{er} guys, I wanted to leave it there.

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{PACKAGING}

I didn’t opt for special packaging or sleeves for any of my books, but Apple sent theirs awesomely packaged in a cardboard sleeve with the Apple logo. Love! Although it ended up in the trash eventually, it was a really nice way to receive my book.

Apple's packaging

{EBOOKS & SALES POTENTIAL}

my book as an eBook

I was so so pleased to see that with Blurb, any book you create can also be purchased as an eBook for less than £2! Their eBooks are currently formatted in the .pub format for functionality with iBooks. So they can only be viewed on an iPhone, iPad or iPod but it says that other devices are coming soon! So how cool is that?!

If you want to sell your book to others, you can do that through both Blurb and Photobox. You can price your book so that there’s a profit which gets sent to you, although with the prices of printing, you have to price the books quite high in order to make a profit. So as wonderful as it would be to consider this a viable route for self-publishing, it isn’t really perfect for that function. But with the eBooks, you can capitalize on the new wave of people using devices for reading and make a great profit selling eBooks through Blurb! Hopefully they’ll release functionality for Kindle and other devices very soon.

{IN CLOSING}

So in closing, there are many different things to consider when choosing which book printer is right for you. It depends on what you aim to do with your book as well as your audience. Many times, price is the main factor in a decision, however quality is of utmost importance, especially when you want your project to be visually and sensually stimulating; pleasing to both the eyes and the fingertips. There are many things I loved about the Apple book and I loved that Photobox so often has BOGO deals so I can pass a copy on to a friend. But all things considered, I would say that Blurb came out on top. The ease of building the book combined with the forward-thinking way they’re harnessing current trends and technologies makes me very excited to keep my eye closely on Blurb in the future.

That said, you can see the whole book I made {HERE}! And this month, 100% of the profits from the book are being given to the House of the Heroes orphanage in the Philippines which is run by my close personal friends so I know exactly how the money is spent. So grab the eBook copy. I promise you’ll laugh your head off every time you look at this book!

Thank you so much for reading. It’s been fun looking into this topic and seeing my book printed in so many different ways.

P.S. Below the video is the text transcription of the video for those of you laying under your covers in the middle of the night, not wanting to wake your spouse with playing the video. Yup…been there! More than I’d like to admit :)

{Transcription}

Hey this is Elizabeth from elizabethhalford.com and today I want to do something completely different. I haven’t rehearsed this video, it might feel a little bit choppy, because what I want to do is I want to show you how I go through my process of finding what direction I want to take a session in when it comes to post production.

Now, when you have your memory card full of images, you’ve got gigs and gigs, you need to sort through them all. And then you need to decide what the session is going to look like; is it going to be vintage, is it going to be urban is it going to be soft and low saturation or is it going to be hard edged and high situation? You have a gigantic decision ahead of and that can be a huge stumbling block for people and it can really really stump you and I know that’s an area where I’ve struggled in the past and I get really nervous when I enter that stage of a session because I know that this is the point where I choose what these photos are actually going to look like. Capturing them in the camera is only a part of it. I wanted you to see it for real and how I got about doing that.

So I have not even looked at the photos that I’m about to look at with you now any more than I have sorted through the throw-aways and have kept the best of the best and now I need to decide which ones I’m going to really focus on editing and how I’m going to choose how they’re going to look. So forgive me if this doesn’t seem as polished as most of my videos!

So what I did was I went into the forest and I spend about 2 hours shooting 3 girls and they’re siblings. So this is one session but in a way its 3 separate sessions. Each girl has their own style, their each a different age. So this is possibly not a way that you approach your own sessions. I separated this session onto three different sessions on my blog. I don’t like putting too many photos in one blog post because it can make a session look like more than it is. And I wanted to be able to show it as I approached it as 3 different sessions, and then there are the photos of the 3 girls together.

I just wanted to show you quickly, I took each girl’s photos in a different direction. So this India, she is the oldest one and she is so gorgeous and so I took her photos in a very soft direction. I didn’t put a lot of haze over the photos or anything like that but I wanted them to be soft and pretty and I also matched her wardrobe, she had a long flowy dress and in some of the photos she’s spinning around and so I wanted to reflect that in my editing style. So there’s India and then this is the little girl Zuri, and her outfit was really poppy. Her mum came over the night before the session and we picked the whole wardrobe so I knew what they were going to be wearing and I wanted to make sure they complemented each other but also showed their own personality and age groups and so she was very poppy and very autumn, the fur on her boots and the colour of the clothes are very autumnal and this is my first session of the autumn season so I wanted her to look like that. Her photos were taken in the direction that was less soft and pastel and more towards autumnal colours.

And then we have Taiven who was kind of in the middle, she’s the middle girl. Also gorgeous and great on camera, really went for it with the camera, they all did and it was really rewarding here in the forest which is my favourite location to shoot.  So I took hers kind of in the middle, whereas Zuri is a bit more bright and poppy and autumnal, and India was very pastel and soft and I wouldn’t say muted but definitely wasn’t punchy. And Taiven is kind of in the middle the colours are very autumnal but also a bit softer. This is another photo of India: you can really see I really went for the pastels I back lit this photo. That is all natural back light, it was a brilliant day. And there’s another photo of India’s, the saturation down, it’s very blurred around the edges and so where I approached each session in a different way, I think the photos are going to look great if they were all put on the wall together but they also maintain their own  integrity as their own sessions.

And then we have the photos of the three girls together and this is what I wanted to show you I had to restrain myself until I was ready to produce this video for you and not take a look at these photos as far as editing goes. I haven’t tried anything on them yet because I wanted you to see how I actually work when doing that.

These are the photos that I chose out of how ever many there were. And I’m going to open them all now, and they are raw so they’re going to open now in adobe camera raw. I have a couple videos about acr if you’re not familiar with it. Before a raw photo opens in Photoshop, it first opens up like this in adobe camera raw.

So this is the first photo that I took of the 3 of them together. I had the two of them sat together and then Zuri ran and came and sat in the middle which is exactly what I wanted her to do, so that definitely a photo that I’m going to edit. This one was back lit. You can see there’s a bit of noise introduced here as a result of being back lit. And I was shooting with two cameras; I had my 5d with a 24-105 L series lens and then I had my 7d with my new 50mm 1.2 L series lens which is absolutely amazing. So when I have 2 camera and 2 lenses, I take my best quality camera which would be my full frame 5d and I put on the inferior quality lens on and its funny to call this beautiful L series lens (the 24-105) an inferior lens. I’m not saying its inferior at all -its absolutely amazing- but if it was between that and the 50mm lens, it is sharp as anything, even from very far away if you crop in on a photo it’s so sharp it’s like you took it that tight, it’s amazing. So I take my favourite camera and I put my number 2 lens on it and then I take my number 1 favourite lens and put it on my number 2 body. So that way I am combining the camera and the lens in a way that I know that I will get the things I like the best about the qualities I like best about them.

So you can see here I’ve named the photos taken with the 7d and then this one here was taken with the 5d so this had the zoom lens and this had the 50mm. I really love this shot, I think Taiven looks a little surprised but India looks so soft and calm. And again that one was taken with the 7d. This one was taken when they weren’t looking so that was completely how they were holding hands which was beautiful and this one was totally impromptu that’s how they were sitting when I came over.

So I’m going to highlight all of these but I’m not going to do that one right now. Okay so I’m going to hit enter I’m not going to do any editing in adobe camera raw. I’m going to use Florabella actions because that’s what I used on the other photos. How I chose which action set I was going to be using, I love Lightroom and I do a lot of videos about Lightroom and I use it in my own personal work. But my favourite way of editing is Photoshop. I’ve tried to absolutely love Lightroom and I do, but the thing is that I love the editing process so deeply and I love to spend hours and hours editing which is why Photoshop works so well for me because a lot of people don’t actually love the editing process quite as much as I do. And it’s kind of just part of just finishing the photos off, so they use Lightroom which is a great way to use it. But for me when it comes to editing I just can’t wait. When I’m taking the photos I just can’t wait till that moment when I can sit down with a cup of tea till one o’clock in the morning editing the photos.

It takes a lot longer to edit this many photos in Photoshop but I like that fact. So I make the decision between Lightroom and Photoshop and I choose Photoshop and then I have to make a decision between all the different actions I have. I’ve got MCP actions I’ve got Totally Rad, I’ve got Florabella, and so I have to make the decision, what am I going to use, and I used Florabella on the other photos and so for continuity I should stick with that for these ones. On some of the photos I used an edge blur and I got that from using RadLab which is from Totally Rad and if I use them on here you’ll get a chance to see them.

So I’ve chosen Florabella and now I have to choose which set I’m going to use. So I used Luxe II on the photos of India, I used an action from Luxe I on Zuri and I think used Luxe II on Taiven. So it’s kind of between Luxe I and II. The new set here, the classic workflow set is really really awesome but it’s not like second nature to me yet so I kind of just went for Luxe, which I love.

What I do first is I choose which photo I think is the best representation of the session to start experimenting on. So I don’t edit any of the other photos until I experiment and figure out exactly what I am doing because I would never treat the other photos with an action or a preset that I didn’t use for the first one. I wouldn’t take them all in different directions I want the photos to all look exactly the same as much as they possibly can.

So I think I’m going to start with this one. The thing that concerns me the most is that there is like a red catchlight in her eye which is really bizarre, I don’t know what that came from. So I’m going to see what the chances are of getting rid of that. I’ll using the healing brush tool and see if I can erase. I don’t know what that’s from! Okay so that’s better. You see India’s are also red. I hate to get rid of catch lights because I love them so much but these are just bizarre they’re not really catch lights, I don’t know what they are.

Okay so I’m going to take a snapshot. Every time I do something that requires that much time cloning something out, I make sure to take a snapshot just so I can keep it there in the history pallet in case I need to go back to it later. Ideally, this tree wouldn’t have been right behind them, I think its distracting, I could also take time to clone it out but them we’ve got India’s hair here. I did move around them and take their photo in different directions and I think maybe some of these represent that but I’m going to start with this one.

So Florabella Luxe II, I love love love it and the first thing I always do when I’m deciding the direction I’m going to take a photo is click ‘try and combine’. So you play this action and what it does is it plays every single action from this whole set on the photo and then when it’s done, it makes it in layers but they’re are all invisible. Then click the visibility icon which is this little eye here to turn them on and off. So this action takes a really long time to play. So I’m just going to cut this bit out and I’ll be right back!

Okay so we’re done there, it took a couple of minutes and what you end up with after doing the try and combine action is this try and combine drop down menu. And so you have all of the different actions her from the Luxe II set and they are all there to turn on and off to see which one you like for your photo. So this is the very first thing I do. If you need to start by lightening or darkening the photo it’s probably a good thing to start doing because these actions are made for well exposed images so if it’s not exposed very well you just want to lighten and darken it pretty quickly. And it’s quite a heavy action because of course each one of these actions is so involved and then now we’ve got tons and tons of them going on. So I’m just going to wait for them to load so it doesn’t take forever.

Okay so we start clicking! So Angel, nope. It’s very instinct reaction it’s like either yes or no. So I take it off the list. Swoon, no, Milk, no, Posh, possibly so I leave it there, Hazy Jane possibly I leave it there, Jane, ShiShi I love it but doesn’t work for this photo. I also love Blush but no. Envy (hesitate) maybe. If I have to think about it for too long I know its not the right one. Halo, possibly. Halo is the one I used for all of the India photos. Vanity, no. Smitten no. Trixie, no. That would be beautiful for spring but not for autumn. Timeless, I really do love that – going to leave that as a possibility. Tuesday nope, Bloom no. B&W Film, this is my absolute black and white of all time, if it’s a preset or and action, B&W Film from the Luxe II set from Florabella is my absolute favourite. If I had to take an entire session and make it B&W, I would go one by one with this action I absolutely adore it. But I also really love the colours in this photo and I haven’t done any of them black and white. Also, you have to be careful when providing black and white for your clients to preview because if you do a couple of photos in black and white you kind of think ‘oh that one looks good in black and white’, but they are going to want to see them all in black and white and before you know it you’ve added like 10 hours to your work.

So now that I’ve whittled them down, I go through them again. Posh, now I don’t like it as much as I did before. Hazy Jane is a possibility but I also really like Halo. So I’ll turn them both on. Halo/Hazy Jane. Halo! Definitely Halo over Hazy Jane so I take Hazy Jane out. Envy, no not anymore. Timeless. So right now we are between using Timeless or Halo. I’m leaning towards Halo. So this is not actually running in the action, I wouldn’t stop there. What I would do is go to that snapshot in the history palette I took after I fixed their eyes and I go actually run the action now. Halo. Because when the action runs it ends up in the grouping that you can drop down and open it and there are loads of different possibilities. So ‘try and combine’ really is just for trying and combining.

Now we’ve played Halo and I open it up and we’ve got all these possibilities so now I go through and I click to see if there’s anything here that needs to go or needs to be turned down of maybe masked off of an area. But I think it’s treated this photo so beautifully. I would possibly bring the lightness down a tiny bit just so their faces aren’t quite so burned out. Sometimes I paint the contrast layers off of the face. So right here we have a layer mask and we take a brush and get it nice and soft and bigger and make it 20%. Just going to paint a little bit of the contrast off of their face because sometimes I find it can lead to some harsh lines that I don’t want. So now their faces do look quite hazy, they don’t look sharp like that photo but that just because its backlit and there’s a lot of really beautiful light coming through and so that’s to be expected.

Okay I’m thinking Halo is going to be really good for these photos so I’m going to take a snapshot just so I don’t lose that spot where I am and so if you don’t know the history palette is where you can go back in time. It gives you an opportunity to go back and forth to see where you are in your editing but it also helps so you can go back to a point in time where I think I’ve gone too far and I want to go back and start again from that point.

Another thing you can do with these actions is that you can turn down the opacity of the entire action. If you just want Halo to affect your photo half-way, you can do that. But I love it all so I don’t want any of it to go.

So Halo it is! So all of those photos from this little area here with the girls together is going to be Halo from the Florabella Luxe II collection. So I don’t save and close that image because I need a point of reference that I can go back to into my editing process. I can go to this photo here and also run Halo. But I need to go back to the other one while I’m editing to make sure I don’t take it too far because if you want these photos to be displayed together you don’t want one to be really contrasty and one to not be. You need to make sure that you’re maintaining consistency in your editing. So I try not to be too custom here in this area. I know in the other photo I took the brightness down a little bit and I also painted some of the contrast off of their faces. And so I go back to that one and make sure they are in the same vein and they are going to look a little bit different because I was down low and there’s more light and less green in the background. These ones are going to look totally different because it was taken from above rather than below. But I like these type of things to be little fillers if I do storyboards or I do a little blogging board to show photos together. Its just nice to have these detailed shots to mix in with the other shots to really tell the story about the girls. And I’m going to go and click to see if any of these need to be adjusted.

Now sometimes, when I decide which action I’m going to use and I would have done this if I had thought about it when I decide which action I’m going to use, instead of going one by one I would go up here to file automate and then batch. And then I would say to batch edit all the open files that I have with that action and I click okay and then what you end up with is it just runs the action on all of your opened files. You can go away for a potty break go for a tea break and come back and that action has been played on all your images. Then you can just go through really quickly and do customisations and make sure everything’s okay. And then you can save and close them. So that’s a really good way to be able to batch edit these. I regret that I didn’t think a bit more ahead when I was composing this but it was just the moment that I had to capture quickly. I think Zuri is falling off of the frame here a little bit too much. And she’s got a booger on her nose. I could even just crop this and have the girls and not have Zuri in it at all and I might actually offer both of those options. And do a duplicate of this photo but just crop the girls right there. So, one click treated that photo very nicely.

Here we have the other one. Now this one is going to look totally different because it was taken in a different spot. This was taken at the very beginning of are time together whereas this was taken closer to the end in a different spot of the woods. And this has treated it really really nicely but you know what I didn’t realise I need to crop it first. I don’t like these things in the background being so crooked. I do my cropping before I run an action because if you do something like a vignette and then you crop it, it’s going to go away. It’s still crooked but that’s not really crooked, it’s more like fading into the distance over there because the girls are really straight on and they’re not really parallel to the fence so that’s okay. Just didn’t want it to be that obvious.

So now I play Halo and I love these actions, they are pretty much one click edits I don’t have to customise them much because they are so amazing. Now, the lighten and darken layers here don’t come with their own layer mask but you can make them. You just click that and I’m just going to paint a tiny bit of the brightness off of their faces, maybe like half. That photo is great!

And there’s another one and another one which is just going to look like this. I love India’s face in this but I think Taiven wasn’t ready. If I focus on photos that aren’t as good as the other photos there’s really no point. So I’m going to look at this one just to make sure I have a really good point of reference for this. So remember I took the lightness up so I’m going to take that down and painted some of the contrast off but this one is even more backlit, this one is really hazy looking. So I’m going to flatten it and then I’m going to go down here in the bottom of the Luxe II set and do a bit of defogging and sharpening. This is a really good way to approach backlit photos because it just does a bit of sharpening and defogging around the edges. I’m going to flatten it and I’m going to play it again. That’s good, it’s much better. But I want to take it off of her eyes because when I do this it kind of makes their eyes too dark. Actually it was pretty good, never mind. Go back. Okay take snapshot in the history pallet and take a look, that’s it straight out of camera and that’s it edited. And then I think this looks pretty much the same. I’m going to go and use MCP Actions eye-doctor. I don’t use it on all photos now. I think it’s something that when you first get it, you use it on all photos and then it just loses its affect. I think you have to be careful about not using it too much. Because you’re going to end up with super souped up eyes in all of your photos and it’s going to cause people to wonder what on earth is going on with all these people’s eyes. So I’m just going to do the sharpening. But I really like to use eye doctor, especially when you have something that’s so hazy as this photo is being that its back lit because the eyes can disappear. Her mouth her hair might be in a fog because the haze of the back lit but I really don’t want to lose her eyes. So that just bought her eyes back and I’m just going to take it down a bit. So that’s before and after. So we’ve bought her eyes back a tiny bit.

So this one looks different from this one because this one is backlit and this one’s not, 2 different locations as well. But that okay because I’m still editing with the same set so the greens are still going to be the same its still going to have a vignette, it’s still going to have the same feel, but a its just going to be a little bit different because of the different locations. And that’s great because it offers your clients more choices anyway and that’s always a very good thing.

So I’m going to make a duplicate of this photo. I’m going to flatten it. And I’m going to save it. And so because I had so many photos I have the jpegs folder here, and the I have it split up into their 3 different photos and now I’m going to make one of them together. And make sure I save it as a jpeg. And then I’m going to crop it. When I crop I just hit ‘front image’ because I want it to maintain the same aspect ratio but if I wanted to go portrait I click back to flip flop it. But you can still kind of see Zuri there. Well I’m going to save it anyway. I’m going to save it as option number 2. And close it.

So I’m just going to go through and save all these photos so that it! I just wanted to show you the process that I go through when I’m choosing what look I’m going to do on my photos and then how I execute that on a batch of photos. So just remember do not save and close your photos as you go, keep them all open as you’re going. If your computer allows it to, some computers slow down with that many files open but just make sure you have at least one of the previous ones open, so that you can go back to it as a point of reference to make sure you’re not losing track and making photos that are all looking different.

So that’s it! Thank you so much for watching this super long video if you’re still watching! And again this has been Elizabeth from elizabethhalford.com. Thanks for watching!

EVERYONE KEEP THOSE SHOTS COMIN. SEND YOUR {SHARP & WELL EXPOSED} PHOTOS TO EH@ELIZABETHHALFORD.COM

If your photo has been featured on Reader Photo Friday and you would like to purchase digital copies for printing yourself, please get in touch. Digital files are only $25 each and 100% of these monies goes to Compassion International to help us edit out poverty for our little guy Victor.

And this is the video of me doing the edit:

EVERYONE KEEP THOSE SHOTS COMIN. SEND YOUR {SHARP & WELL EXPOSED} PHOTOS TO EH@ELIZABETHHALFORD.COM

If your photo has been featured on Reader Photo Friday and you would like to purchase digital copies for printing yourself, please get in touch. Digital files are only $25 each and 100% of these monies goes to Compassion International to help us edit out poverty for our little guy Victor.

One of the service I offer to my readers is to take images they send me and, via Skype, talk to them about what stumps them about editing and edit their image(s) in front of them online! It’s so much fun and I’ve gotten rave reviews for this service from those who have taken advantage of it. Click here for more info about these ‘Skype consults’.

So here’s the image B&A:

annabefore annaafter2 And this is the video that shows me editing the image:

Tools used in editing:

• MCP Actions {fusion set}
• Florabella Textures {set III}
• Vol25 Eye Candy Overlays

{Further Viewing Pleasure}

Using Presets in ACR

How Lightroom users can ease into Photoshop using ACR

• Look at the images used as examples when buying. Were they taken outside? Then your indoor flash photos won’t get the same results. The results might still be spectacular, but not exactly the same.
• If you’ve seen a B&A, was the ‘before’ already a near-perfectly exposed image? Presets & actions need a well exposed image to start with.
• Check with the maker if they were created to work best with jpegs or raw.
• Presets and actions are very rarely a one-click deal. Every image is different and so these great little plug-ins for your photo editing software are just a foundation for editing.
• After running an action, go into the layers palette and tweak the resulting layers. Mask bits out and fiddle with opacities.
• After running a preset in LR or ACR, take a look at the sliders and educate yourself on what the preset has done to your image and change things to customize your result.

Actions & presets are an excellent (for me, must-have) tool to help you edit your images. I just think the most important thing to know is that they’re not meant to be one-click solutions for your photos but a springboard for your own creativity!

As you can see, this photo was pretty amazing SOOC. So sharp and clear and beautiful. Great light in the eyes. Interesting location. So I just spruced it up a little in Elements (it’s been so long since I’ve played with Elements!)

I used this FREE action from CoffeeShop to pop the eyes and soften the skin. And then an action from Florabella’s vintage collection.