Coloring with Totally Rad Photoshop Actions and Plugins

   Over the past months I have devoted a good amount of my free time to exploring photography styles and developing it into an art that I can call my own "style."  Along with a a recent studio lighting class, this is another of my efforts in an attempt to stand out from the entry level DSLR owners and growing population or photography hobbyists.
   I have adopted a method many artists use in developing their own style. I closely examine and deconstruct the work of other photographers, and incorporate things that I like with techniques I already know. This doesn't only apply to the shoot, but also to the way others go about post processing. So, my efforts led me to post processing and coloring. Ever since, I've been using tools like Rad Lab by the Totally Rad company to give my photos that "little something extra."

Here, I've colored some pictures I shot of a friend Amanda St. Pierre, a beautiful and extremely talented artist herself.

Check out Amanda's cover of Ingrid Michelson's Die Alone, and download it free from Soundcloud.

   In the above picture I completely desaturated the photo out of the camera. Then I added a warmer sepia like tone to break away from the typical black and white. I also added purple and blue hues in the background to play with the color temperatures and give the picture a bit more depth. What it really all boils down to is what you think looks cool. That's what is fun about the Rad Lab process. You don't have to think about your color schemes at any length because the steps involved are completely nondestructive. If you don't like the way something looks, scrap it and start again.

 I also wanted to display the low key, high contrast elements of the picture. This, accompanied by my love of mixing color temperatures works well in Rad Lab. The colors seen in the picture above are nearly impossible to get straight out of the camera. This look was achieved by mixing different amounts of  3 different settings along with bumping up the saturation a bit. After coming up with "recipes" like this, Rad Lab users can share them along with the pictures they were used in on the their website, gettotallyrad.com.

 Here's an example of a quick concoction using another photo with less contrast than the ones above. On the left is the raw picture before coloring, and on the right is the photo after doing some light coloring with the plug-in.