How to get this effect...

eric-holmes

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How do you get the pastel, muted colors as seen in these photos? It has to be more than just desaturated. It wouldn't look like that if it was just desaturated.
 

Bitter Jeweler

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They look slightly desaturated to me.

By god, the eyes in those photos are horrid!
 

reznap

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I think there's some RAW split-toning going on as well. What that means, basically, is that the highlights are tinted one color and the shadows tinted another. You can also do this with the RGB curves in photoshop for the same effect.
 

mrpink

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WAAAAAY too much skin softening, to the point of being unnatural and thus distracting. For kids that age, little to no work should be done on the face. Slight eye brightening is ok- but I agree with bitter here, it is overdone in a lot of those photos.

And yes, they all look desaturated to some extent.



p!nK
 

Josh66

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Slight eye brightening is ok- but I agree with bitter here, it is overdone in a lot of those photos.
They eye brightening is overdone? I'm not sure that I saw the same pictures as you did, lol!

In most of them (all but one that I saw), the eyes were black holes...
 

Derrel

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black hole eyes...weird, grossly overexposed highlights on foreheads and faces...desaturated, odd color...surely you're not trying to emulate that look...it has a total MWAC newbie look to it...awful stuff. You are right when you state that "It wouldn't look like that if it was just desaturated." No, it wouldn't--you'd also need to have overexposed shot,with exposures all over the place...some of these are "salvaged", blown exposures with HUGE amounts of highlight recovery done on them, which is how to get that dreadful sickly yellowish look on foreheads and faces.
 
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eric-holmes

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They look slightly desaturated to me.

By god, the eyes in those photos are horrid!

Oh I completely agree. That, along with the skin smoothing, is completely too much. She is what you would call the competition in my local area. Mothers are eating that color effect up. She keeps bragging about how she has booked 5 weddings in her first year of photography. I have turned down that many because I am smarter than that.
 

oldmacman

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How do you get the pastel, muted colors as seen in these photos? It has to be more than just desaturated. It wouldn't look like that if it was just desaturated.

It looks as though they are desaturated and then the levels have been adjusted into the lighter tones. You can see where it has gone too far with the highlights becoming flat tones. A better approach might be to desaturate the image and then use a screen layer in photoshop to lighten the tones.
 

FirstLight

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Looks similar to a LilyBlue or Florabella action. I agree about the eyes...eeeeek.

Jenn
 

Petraio Prime

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How do you get the pastel, muted colors as seen in these photos? It has to be more than just desaturated. It wouldn't look like that if it was just desaturated.

These are horrible, overexposed or over-brightened. Why do you want to reproduce this 'effect'? Why not work on content? And what's with the crooked pictures?

This stuff is dreadful.

If you're going to copy someone, copy someone who is competent.
 
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Kofman13

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those kids with the dark eyes are gonna give me nightmares... children of the corn anyone?
 

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