minimal me + a little about Actions

Lately I've been digital scrapping. What an epiphany! lol. No, but I have been more efficient by going simple and often times minimal. With scrapping simplistic digital layouts I can get them done faster. Faster is what the doctor ordered as of late. I've been continually recording my day-to-day activities for my Week In The Life album. I'm doing real well with that. (The envelope for Monday's mementos is overflowing!)

So with me busy getting my album together I've been doing quick layouts in between time. Like some of these latest ones:

  

[ Layouts created using my digital kits. You can find them at my shop here ]

I love the look of the minimalistic type of layouts. ( I'm loving Kraft too ^_^ ) Simplistic layouts are graphic and refreshing to me. They're so easy to do also. Templates can help you get you jump started. Templates can be simple or very ornate. Not to be confused with Quick Pages though. Quick Pages are almost always fully decorated and you just add photos and your own text. With Templates you have a blank canvas of shapes that are put together in a specific way so when you add your papers, elements and story the page will have a great designed base but you still have creative freedom to build upon it. Both quick pages and templates have their place. Here is an example of how I jazzed up the template from the Jillan kit.

 

Even the simplest of templates can be made into something pretty cool! When you do the more simplistic layouts wither it be traditional or digital, I find that the eye is drawn to the pictures. This fact, believe it or not, has made me want to start to play with actions again. I wanted to have some fun with my photos! I haven't always been an 'action' lover, if you will. I would tend to used them sparingly and lightly. It's been in the past months that I have explored the the different emotions you can get from a photo with just the right action(s) applied. I have been asked how my post processing method and although I'm no professional by any means I will share with you my favorite things to do with my pictures.

Q: Do you use actions on your photos? They always look so natural.

Most of the time, yes. If I'm in love with the moment captured but it's very blurry and "imperfect" then I leave it and use it anyway. Those pictures are some of my favorites. The reason my photos look natural is because often times I enhance them a little. Just giving them a boost that will seal the deal.

Q: Do you shoot in RAW or JPEG?

I always shoot in JPEG. I've never shot RAW. Only because I'm a bit timid about it and to be honest my SD cards are not that big to shoot RAW much. I would only be able to shoot a few photos when I believe in clicking away until you get that 'shot'. JPEG works just fine for me right now. And the cool thing is that I can always take my JPEG's into Bridge Camera Raw and edit them in there before taking them into Photoshop. That's one thing I like to do sometimes since I do not own Lightroom.

Q: Do you pre-edit your pictures in Lightroom?

No. I do not own Lightroom. I tried downloading it but it's incompatible with my computer for some reason lol! But I hear it's a very awesome program to pre-edit your photos.

Q: What are you favorite actions to use on your photos?

Totally Rad Actions. I love them because they really thought about what a picture could become. They paid attention to the common issues we face like blowing out a photo with too much light. Or too much yellow. Or wanting skin tones to stay nice while boosting the color in other places. These are just some of the things that actions I have worked with in the past could not help. With TRA you have full control. They're perfect for mixing as well. ( see their recipe pages ) You can get some pretty awesome results.  

Q: I tried actions but they always make my pictures look too over-the-top. How can I fix this?

First thing is to make sure that your photo is not too small. Actions work best at full size. So when you open up your photo strait from the camera, that size would be good to do your actions on. Mine are usually like 45 inches at 72 dpi when before I resize them later.

Also, depending on the action, try desaturating it as well as erasing parts you do not want the action to show up on. As I said above with the TRA, you have total control. Once I run an action I almost always lower the opacity and then play around with the individual mask layers. IF the action you are using allows for no control, try duplicating the original layer and run the action on it. Then you can dim or erase that duplicate layer for a more subtle effect. If that doesn't work and the actions flattens both both layers, then before running the action duplicate the image by going to IMAGE > DUPLICATE. Run the action on the duplicate image then drag it on top of the original, dim + erase to taste.

Here are some before and after examples

 

 

 

 

 

Most of these are subtle changes but I've done some wild ones too! I mean sometimes I'm in the mood to go wild with color! And that's ok. Whatever your in the mood for. I've noticed that lately I've been into more of the muted color tones like in the above layouts. It's all in the fun ^_^

I hope you all have a great night and I'll be back in a bit,

-out

Comments

[Natalie E]

I'm loving your digital layouts. So much so that I have scraplifted one (I hope that's ok?) I don't do digital, so it's a traditional layout. I posted it on my blog (with due credit to you of course) today. You can see it here if you like: http://onescrappydoctor.blogspot.com/2010/05/clean-and-simple.html