Hi Everyone,

I couldn't find anything about Barb Uil's aka Jinky Art style here. I wonder if some people here can give comments on how to achieve the same color saturation and contrast she does without making the image gross like plugged shadows, etc. Her images look very clean and although saturated still looks natural.

You can pluck down $99 under, Itty Bitty Actions. However, I think there is more about those images besides a one click enhancement.

Hoping for some inputs.

www.jinkyart.com.au/

Her colors are very bright, but I find most of her images have too many highlights blown out for my taste.

IMHO, when I see a single picture with this kind of edit I don't like it at all....however, when they are grouped they form a very nice piece of art.

really colorful images, i think these work best for shots of children to give them the dream like effect.

I use Itty Bitty and lots of other actions with my childrens photography. They are definately not "one click" magic answers - you do need to lower opacity and use layer masks at every step to stop the highlights blowing or arriving at un-natural skin colours. I pretty much reduce every action by 50% when it comes to skin. I find a similar effect can be achieved just by adding a Soft Light layer and playing with saturation on the different colours in the image and then a final tweak with a slight s curve. The most important factor though, either way, is layer masking.

Oh and I'd beg to differ, sorry, about Barb having blown highlights..Out of the hundreds and hundreds of images I've seen of hers, I could not recall any being "blown". Having taken her online course and gotten a lot of feedback from her, I know for a fact she will bin a blown image no matter how good it might otherwise be,.

There is an important difference between blown "important" highlights and blown "unimportant" highlights. I've seen a lot of Barb's images and she doesn't blow the important highlights. She blows highlights, yes, but always to set a mood and it always enhances the image. The subjects and mood are most important to her.

For example, the first image in her portfolio (the family eating at a diner), the view outside the window is "blown". Who cares about the view outside? The subject is the family. At this exposure Barb has filled the frame with light, which allows the bright colors to play against the white background. Bright colors look brighter against white.

If you look at Architectural Digest you'll notice the same technique being used many times. If the view through a window isn't appealing (the parking lot in the example above), they'll blow it out.