I wanted to give you another option for editing your wildlife photography images in photoshop.  Using portrait actions!  Just because it’s a portrait action doesn’t mean you HAVE to use it on a photo of a person.

Here is the before/after of an image of an Osprey flying with a fish.  The first thing I did was crop it, since I wasn’t keeping up with the bird as I should have, he’s a little off center.

Next, I used the FREE Coffee Shop Action: Perfect Portrait (you can grab that HERE, along with more specific directions on using this action).

You’ll want to fiddle around with the layers that this action leaves you with after it’s finished running.  I used the layers to lighten and sharpen the eye, lighten some of the shadows under the wing (I didn’t want to go crazy, those shadows are just natural to how the light was that day, I just wanted to lighten them up a tad), and I left the vignette…I liked the effect it gave.  You don’t ALWAYS have to edit your wildlife photos to be totally realistic, you can have a little creative fun too!

Once finished, you just flatten and ’save as’ a jpg.

I wanted to show you a quick and easy (and free!) way to edit your wildlife photos.  I do own actions that I have purchased, but I figured if you wanted to follow along and use the same actions I did that I’d use free ones that you can find online (links are provided).

I started out with this photo of a Pie Billed Grebe I took last weekend.  He was quite a distance away, so what you see below is the un-cropped, original version.  I chose this image of the Grebe because he had tilted his head just so….and there was light on the eye.  For me, I LOVE when you can get a nice light on the eyes of any animal you’re photographing.  It really makes the image pop, and gives you a little more interest and ‘personality’ in the photo.

Before:

After:

First, I cropped it…I didn’t want him dead center in the image.

Then I used Pioneer Woman’s Action Set 2 – specifically ‘Bring On The Eyes’.  I ran the action and used a soft round brush to paint the eye, to lighten it up a bit and bring it out more, when finished I flattened the image.

Next, in that same action set I used, ‘Sharpen This’.  I used a soft round brush to paint over the eye again to give it a bit more ‘punch’, when finished I flattened the image. (I didn’t sharpen any other parts of the image, but you can adjust the opacity of the brush (and make it larger or smaller) to sharpen any other parts of your image that may need it before you flatten.)

Next I used the Coffee Shop Action, Color Pop.  Specifically the ‘Single Shot Color Pop’ action in the set.  I ran the action till it ’stopped’ and then adjusted the layers.  I turned off the ‘brightness and contrast’ and ‘gradient map 1′ layers, I really didn’t need them for the look I was going for. I brought down the ‘levels’ layer to 52% and the ‘Hue/Saturation 1′  layer to 51%.  When I had the image how I liked it, I pressed play to let the action continue and flatten my image.

And then, to quickly resize these images and make them web-ready…I used MCP’s High Def Sharpening, specifically the Crystal Clear Web Resize and Sharpening action.  This will change your image to 72dpi and 900 pixels wide.  After the action runs, it gives you a sharpening layer…I usually turn this off and just flatten the image, but you can use it if you like…for me, it tends to ‘over sharpen’ so I usually turn it off.

That’s it!