Sarah T asks: “Clayton I am so in love with your images. The colors are just beautiful. Would you please share some of your processing tips and tricks? Pretty please?”

Well, Sarah T, only because you said pretty please. And for the record I’ll have you know that my very first date was a Sarah T. Her name was Sarah Thomas but because we also had a Sarah Matthews we simply referred to them as Sarah T and Sarah M. Anyway, we were in the 6th grade and our first date was to the roller rink. To this day I remember how smitten I was when I discovered I was on a date with the only girl in our entire class that could not only skate backwards, but could also do the formentioned while singing along to every word of Bon Jovi’s “Living on a prayer”….

Okay, so now that I got that out of the way most would be surprised at how little work really goes into my images. When broken down there are indeed quite a few individual steps, however because I have my mastered my workflow by incorporating actions and F Key functions things move along quite quickly. The key is actually setting up the shot in camera. Typically I will usually over expose by a full stop in camera in order to blow out the sky completely. Especially if I am aiming to catch a bit of sun flare. I do this because the color shifting and tone adjustments I use on my images work best on a white sky or blown out flare. Of course, the negative side to this is losing a bit of the contrast in the shadows but thankfully that can easily be corrected in photoshop.

So lets get to it.

The following image was taken on a Canon 5D Mark II with a 45mm 2.8 tilt shift. This my absolute favorite lens and is permanently attached to one of my 5D bodies. It was shot in Manual at ISO 160, 1/80, @ f/3.5

This is the image straight out of camera.

The first thing I do on ALL of my images is “Match the Mountains”. That is to say I do a Levels Adjustment. The reason that Levels makes it so easy to understand what the histogram is telling us is because the Levels dialog box includes a horizontal gradient bar directly below the histogram. The gradient starts from pure black on the far left and gradually gets brighter until it reaches pure white on the far right. In most cases you want to be sure that your “sliders” are matching up with where the “mountains” begin and end. Why? Well, that’s a whole other post. But just trust me for now.

The next thing that I did was throw a little “Fill Flash” from Kubota Actions set onto Tahni’s face. This particular action gets used quite a bit therefor it has been assigned my F6 function key. In this case 50% opacity did the trick.I also sharpened Tahni’s face using TRA’s “Selective Sharpening” action which has also been assigned an F key function.

As I mentioned in my For Photographers section I now use a majority of my own customized color toning actions. They have all been named after my favorite movies and one of my go-to actions is called Lars and the Real Girl. Fantastic flick by the way…

Lastly I burned the edges for interest but more importantly because I can dammit.

And there you have it. As I said earlier, very basic stuff. Nothing to write home to mom about but did just the trick. Don’t you think?

People often ask me how I was able to build such a successful business in a short amount of time. The answer: Attention to detail (and many a long night I might add). I wanted to be sure that EVERY image my client received was the very best it could be. Not just the ones on the blog or in their album. But every. single. image. Of course in the beginning this proved to be quite the daunting task. Thankfully I focused on becoming as efficient as possible with my post processing early on which now allows me the opportunity to provide my clients with 400 hand edited images AND still have time to watch Private Practice on the couch with my sweetheart.