Welcome to my eighth installment of Recipe Mondays using Totally Rad Actions! I spent some time with this beautiful pregnant momma’ and her adoring husband this past Saturday and will have more from this session posted later on this week.

Here is the original SOOC (straight out of camera):

I used “Yin/Yang” to “Yin” some of the areas on her face that were shaded from the branches.

Using the paintbrush tool, I applied “Green with Envy” on some of the foliage to give them a little color.

I thought the image could use an overall darkening, so I did “Lights Out” at 20% opacity.

As much as I love the branches, there are too many of them and in my opinion take a lot of the focus off of this gorgeous mommy. So I wanted to create a tilt-shift lens effect to bring the focus on her. To do this, choose “f/zero”. Your whole image should be a blur.

Then choose the gradient tool from the left-hand tool bar, and choose the gradient that fades from the center out (see the red arrow). Once you’ve selected that, click in the center of the image and drag out to the edge of the photo and release. I dragged to the edges at an angle in this image. She should be mostly in focus now and the edges blurred, but it’s going to look pretty low quality.

Now we’ll want to convert the blur to a high quality version, so select “f/zero Super HQ Conversion” and let it do its work. Once the action finishes, you’ll notice the blur looks more like that of a tilt shift lens. You can even choose to do the “f/zero Insane Quality Conversion”, but you may need to go grab a sandwich and have some lunch while the action runs since it could take quite some time.

The entire image seemed cool to me so to warm up the tones I ran “Warm it up, Kris!” at 100% opacity.

To even out her facial skin tone, select “Pro Retouch” and touch up her face, then reduce the opacity to 70% to keep some of the natural pores.

To darken the edges and bring more focus to the center, I used “Burn-Out” at 40% opacity.

Then I wanted to add another warm antiquish tone to the overall image so for this I used “Get Faded (Autumn)” at 35% opacity.

And there’s your Before & After!

What do you guys think? I’d love to hear your thoughts!