Sunshine & bright smiles | Minneapolis family photography

3 Oct

This post is a bit different than others I’ve done in the past. Unfortunately, every July – Sept I start to drown in editing as wedding season ramps up, along with family sessions and seniors. And with the ramp up of sessions, I begin to neglect my blog and Facebook page as I try and stay afloat with all the editing. So this post is a bit of a “catch up”, but has a little bonus content for other photography junkies like myself. 🙂

For those of you here simply because you like to peek at picture, there are plenty below! And for my fellow photogs, I wanted to share a little bit about my editing style and workflow, and how I’m able to keep up with sessions amidst the chaos of “photography season” (living in Minnesota, we have about four months that are extremely busy and we tend to pack as much as we can into these few months, so a quick and efficient workflow is a must).

I’m thankful to have a number of tools to help me out so that I can still turn images back to my clients in a timely fashion! One of my favorite tools are the actions I have from Kevin Kubota. For all my clients that are not photography geeks like me, you probably won’t care a whole lot about what I have to say here (but feel free to peruse the images below :))…but for all of you photog enthusiasts, pay attention. If you have not taken a look at Kevin Kubota Actions, do yourself a favor and head over to the website or Facebook page right now…there are a number of “paks” to choose from, and I think they do EVERYTHING you can imagine.

One of my favorite times of the day to shoot (like any photographer), is during that window of time right before sunset. I love the warm glow and creativity that comes from “playing” with the sun. But it does have it’s challenges, mainly coming from backlighting images (which I love to do). Thankfully, Kevin Kubota actions have a solution even for this!! 🙂 I do like my images to be very crisp, clean and “true-to-life.” I don’t get as into some of the “trends” that photography goes through when it comes to post processing.

Because of my editing style, I use actions from the Kevin Kubota Artistic Tools V1 often. It speeds up my workflow and is subtle and consistent with my style. On nearly every image I included below, I used Backlight Compensation (at varying percentage of opacity), which is fabulous to bring back some color and even out the lighting a bit (and can also be used to create that hazy look that is so trendy right now).

In addition to action paks, I have to give props to my other ABSOLUTELY necessary tool I use (how did I ever survive without this!). The Kubota DASHBOARD plug-in is amazing. This is another HUGE time saver when it comes to editing, and it gives me the ability to categorize my actions by style, “look”, keyword, or even type of session, and then quickly find them.

I’ve included the actions I used on each image below, however, it’s important to note that very rarely do I leave the layers at 100% (as I alluded to earlier). Typically I change the opacity to around 15-40%. (Click on the thumbnail gallery to enlarge the images and scroll through.)

I can’t recommend Kubota Actions enough. If you’re in the market for some new tools to help you out in Photoshop, these should be a strong consideration!