After spending the last year blogging about home projects and my lovely children, I’ve decided to add back in my first love, photography, to this blog. I started a practically nonexistent short lived series back when I kept up a regular portrait photography blog called Photo Tip Tuesday that I’d like to dust off and try out again. I plan to cover everything from getting correct exposure and pleasing composition to capturing quiet memory moments of your family and more formal portrait tips. There is almost no limit to what we can talk about here, and I’d love to take suggestions from blog readers, as well—comment below and let me know what you are interested in learning about!

For starters I thought I’d share how I prepare my photos for blog posts and an action set that has become indispensable for me over the past six months or so. I use Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop CS 5 for all my photo editing and shoot in RAW format with my Canon 5d Mark II. Sound like a bunch of technical junk? Sorry! I understand that most bloggers use a free editing service like PicMonkey or something similar, but I’ve found that for truly fantastic results, investing in and using the industry standard products is the best way to go. Did you know Adobe offers completely free, no strings attached 30-day trials of all of their Creative Suite products? You can also subscribe to Adobe for a fairly low monthly fee to use products like Photoshop to see if you truly need the sophisticated tools offered.

Enough with the jargon, though. I’m here today to tell you how I take a set of images, click a few times in Photoshop, and create this:

Or this

Or this

I use WBActions Ultimate Blog Collection Actions to create these photo boards with just a few simple steps. A Photoshop action is a set of predetermined steps that are programed in sequence and recorded in Photoshop. To use one, you simply click the action you want to apply to your image and hit a “play” button, then follow the steps as they appear on the screen. The ease and simplicity is one of the BIG reasons I use Photoshop—when you’re taking and editing a lot of photos to share online, you often perform the same steps over and over again during the editing process. With a recorded action, you save time and get the same beautiful results every time.

The Ultimate Blog Collection actions offer 19 different layouts to showcase your images. They are great to use in writing up a tutorial when several small photos will work as well (and be more visually appealing and Pin-able) as several large, slow loading images.

A few more examples from my archives:

If you write a blog that includes sharing a lot of images in one post, you have to check these out. They save me SO much time in generating the images for my posts.

What topics are you interested in seeing covered in future Photo Tip Tuesday posts? Do you use Lightroom or Photoshop for editing? Would additional editing tutorials be helpful? Leave your questions in the comments so I can address them in the future!