Here’s an effect that’ll give your portrait photos nice rich blacks and your subject creamy looking skin. It’s very simple to do but it’s a look that’s popular with a lot of wedding / portrait photographers at the moment.

Here’s our starting image by mollypop…

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All you have to do is add a new layer, fill it with black and set its blend mode to hue. That desaturates your image completely but if you then reduce the opacity of the black layer to around 30% you’ll start to get the look we’re going for. I’ve gone for 50% to accentuate the effect…

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All that remains to do is add a Levels adjustment layer and use the Input Levels sliders to make some adjustments until you get the look you want. I set the grey point to 0.80…

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You might also want to add a Brightness/Contrast adjustment layer. I set Brightness to +15 and Contrast to +25…

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