Photoshop Action: Boost saturation without affecting skin tones
There is a tremendous amount of adobe photoshop actions out there to give the velvia saturation, these photoshop actions are great for landscape pictures and for pictures that do not contain people.
However, when the picture involves people in it, boosting the saturation becomes much more tricky because of the skin tones.
Photoshop Tutorial: Dynamic range optimization
Photoshop Tutorial: Smoother skin with texture
This is great adobe photoshop tutorial I found on RetouchPro that shows how to get a smoother skin for portrait retouching but without, however, loosing all the skin texture.

The tutorial can be found here
Photoshop Tutorial: Dragan style in video
Andrzej Dragan is very famous for his portrait photography and specially for his portrait retouching.
Although his retouching technique is kept as secret as coca cola formula, many (if not all) of the photoshop gurus are trying their best to come as close as possible to his retouching style.
Photoshop Tutorial : B&W Conversion formulas
I’m by no means an Adobe Photoshop guru, on the contrary I’m a complete novice and still struggle with VERY basic manipulations like layer masking and many others.
One of my biggest problems was (and still is) black and white conversion, I’ve read about every Adobe Photoshop tutorial I could find on this subject I could find on the net and still none gave my little brain a satisfactory answer it was expecting. For THIS result do THAT for THIS result do THAT etc…
The only conclusion I was able to reach is that Channel Mixer is considered by many the best and most flexible method.
So if, like me, you are looking for straight answers and aren’t really able to do your own experiments her is a set of conversion settings that a fellow photographer “Karim” gave me just today.






















