Pre Photoshop, an image was worth a thousand words and proof of something’s existence. Post photoshop – yes, the camera does lie. IG influencers with shoddy photoshop skills share images making themselves thinner or curvier. We now have experts, hunting down photo fabricators, examining pixels and EXIF to see if the image is doctored. Prestigious competitions demand you have a RAW copy of the image if they want to check its authenticity. There is even an app now for businesses to weed out fake IDs.

If you arent one to enter competitions with said rules, or you aren’t submitting the image as true and newsworthy, then Photoshop is a whole heap of fun. It takes your image beyond simple cloning out distractions or adding the odd bird here and there, opening a whole new world of composition related art.

Obviously, I was not in a boat in the arctic with three polar bears but it was fun to imagine the scenario and bring it to life. Photoshop also played a big part in the image below of my nephew. This image required no compositing as we created our set and shot the photos – but photoshop turned it into a whole different concept.

The Concept

I wanted something along the Game of Thrones, north of the wall look. We setup our backdrop and dressed our subject in medieval costume. From there I took the images into photoshop.

The Editing

To get that cold, blue look, in ACR, I brought the temperature down to 3100. I also upped the whites to +42 and dropped the highlights to -76. From there I ran a few of my favourite actions from Greater than Gatsby (they have a 35% off sale on at the moment too). I also used the Detail Revealer brush on the face, turned the eyes blue (another GTG action), and using a selective cool workflow brush cooled down the skin tones. Lastly, I added two snow overlays from Summerana.

The whole edit took about ten steps and 10 minutes. I do love photoshop. But I don’t feel the need to reinvent the wheel and spend hours on one image when there are tools out there to speed up my workflow. Why handwrite a 5000-word essay when we have computers? To me, it’s the same thing. It’s just time management. Yes, there are a lot of crappy actions out there, but there are pearls among them and GTG stands out. They are in fact the only ones I now use having ditched all the crappy free ones. And no, it’s not a paid endorsement.

If you haven’t got into Photoshop actions yet, give them a try. They will speed up your workflow immeasurably as well as create work you didn’t think yourself capable of.