How do you get your greens and background look creamy in Photoshop?

melhovius · Nov 2, 2015

Hi I keep seeing so many wedding photographers create beautiful creamy warm images, and there greens are not so strong and dark. I know cannons are softer, but I have a nikon D700 and was wondering if i would be able to create the same effect maybe in photoshop. Here is an example of what I am talking about! How do they do it? The colours are just so light and airy! How can I do this in Photoshop or do i have to get Lightroom. Oh and I have Cs5.5 photoshop. Thanks.
Megan Laura Photography's Photos - Megan Laura Photography | Facebook

Megan Laura Photography's Photos - Megan Laura Photography | Facebook

480sparky · Nov 2, 2015

Out of focus backgrounds are a function of the lens' aperture and focal length and not any post work.

The lightness is due to overall overexposure.

Also, forum rules do not allow you to post images that aren't yours. You may want to change them to links before the Mod Squad comes along.

runnah · Nov 2, 2015

480sparky said:
You may want to change them to links before the Mod Squad comes along.

I am on my union mandated break.

astroNikon · Nov 2, 2015

unfortunately there's also APPS that do that on Android and iPhone
Though not as well as a DSLR Aperture control.

here's an example for Android ==> Blur Image Background - Android Apps on Google Play

iPhone example APP (number 4 in particular) ==> 7 Ways To Enhance Your iPhone Photos With Creative Blur

All the photos are a PNG photo with what little EXIF data was with the photo, which is a format my iPhone uses. Of course, I would assume someone didn't take a wedding photos with an iPhone (who's wife just did that though ?)

melhovius · Nov 2, 2015

Thanks, I forgot about that. And yes I know how to create a bokeh, but my over exposed photos do not look that creamy in colour.

480sparky · Nov 2, 2015

runnah said:
I am on my union mandated break.

Did you get your union-mandated amount of bacon? :biggrin-new:

480sparky · Nov 2, 2015

melhovius said:
Thanks, I forgot about that. And yes I know how to create a bokeh, but my over exposed photos do not look that creamy in colour.

It could be the exposure is adjusted in post.

beckylynne · Nov 2, 2015

You could probably achieve this look by over exposing a little in lightroom...warming the image in the temperature settings and pulling out some of the greens. Chances are if her images look consistently like this she has created a lightroom or photoshop action.

Derrel · Nov 2, 2015

I would agree...this is probably done via an action or preset. The greens have definitely been toned down in software, and the white balance is fairly warm. Green is a color that can usually be desaturated globally in people pictures, since people's skin does not really have much of a green component to it compared to say trees or grasses. I think of this look as a sort of light, bright, and airy look, which seems appropriate for an engagement session done in a pastoral type of location like this one was.

dennybeall · Nov 3, 2015

In the second one if you zoom in real close in PS there appears to be a bit of a halo all around the two people which may indicate a post-process routine that made all the background go oof.
The first just looks like shallow DOF.

sabbath999 · Nov 3, 2015

Better, learn how to do that effect in camera and do it on purpose as you are shooting it.

Those shots are overexposed about a stop, so you can achieve that by using an aperture of about F/2.8m, and use a +1 stop on your exposure compensation.

IMHO that's some pretty darned ugly bokeh, it looks like a kit lens open all the way... but I may be wrong...

Derrel · Nov 3, 2015

melhovius said:
Hi I keep seeing so many wedding photographers create beautiful creamy warm images, and there greens are not so strong and dark. I know cannons are softer, but I have a nikon D700 and was wondering if i would be able to create the same effect maybe in photoshop. Here is an example of what I am talking about! How do they do it? The colours are just so light and airy! How can I do this in Photoshop or do i have to get Lightroom. Oh and I have Cs5.5 photoshop. Thanks.
Megan Laura Photography's Photos - Megan Laura Photography | Facebook

Megan Laura Photography's Photos - Megan Laura Photography | Facebook

I went to Megan Laura's Facebook page, which linked me to her blog. At the blog, I looked through two weddings,and what I saw was this: she shoots wide-open almost ALL the time, even when she probably should not. The invitations and closer-up, detail shots often have 95% OOF items, and it looks affected. Anyway, it looks to me like she shoots Canon, and has a 50mm, an 85mm, and a 24-70 f/2.8. She shoots a lot from 8-15 feet away. Definitely a full frame shooter, probably a 5D II or III I would guess. She definitely desaturates a lot of her images; on the very few images that have a solid black in them, it almost looks like a mistake, so she keeps the black point "high", most definitely, which is popular right now with wedding shooters who favor that light, bright, airy look. She processes with the brightness set fairly high, and the saturation probably in the slightly negative range.

Her look is overall a delicate, feminine, ethereal look, which lens itself well to desaturated, muted color palette types of images. She shoots a fair amount in backlighting, which naturally leads to a light image when one "lifts" the shadowed faces and clothes up to get them into the right tonal value. She seems to do almost all of her group shots outdoors in backlighting and I can almost bet she has no use for flash. She works the same, basic equipment and the same, basic shooting and posing techniques, and the same, basic processing routines over and over and over, and she's very consistent at it. She does only a very few things, but she does them well.

Ornello · Jan 22, 2016

melhovius said:
Hi I keep seeing so many wedding photographers create beautiful creamy warm images, and there greens are not so strong and dark. I know cannons are softer, but I have a nikon D700 and was wondering if i would be able to create the same effect maybe in photoshop. Here is an example of what I am talking about! How do they do it? The colours are just so light and airy! How can I do this in Photoshop or do i have to get Lightroom. Oh and I have Cs5.5 photoshop. Thanks.
Megan Laura Photography's Photos - Megan Laura Photography | Facebook

Megan Laura Photography's Photos - Megan Laura Photography | Facebook

Why are you admiring, and trying to emulate, incompetent photography? These are simply over-exposed (or processed in a way that simulates over-exposure).

I looked at her web site. Her work is breathtakingly awful. Another case of someone trying to be 'creative'. Ugh!

IronMaskDuval · Jan 22, 2016

If you don't have a blurred background ooc, use the brush tool in Lightroom to paint the background then pull the clarity all the way down.

Garasaki · Jan 29, 2016

Boy I have to agree with some of the others, in that I find her photo's to be really quite poor. What the original poster is calling creamy, I'm calling overexposed and completely lacking in detail. Some of the picture composition is really quite bizarre. VERY large expanses of white sky (cause, like, I always see the sky looking completely white...) in pictures that really isn't making a lot of sense to me. No vibrancy or details or much interest in the pictures.

Having said that, apparently this photographer is running a fairly popular business, so the important people (that is, the people with money) must like something about it.

Note, this post is full of personal opinion and preference, and devoid of fact.