Mama’s Sparkle Action resizing the Sparkles
Hi! This Mama Shan with another instructional video tutorial, to demonstrate some advanced techniques and that is to apply Mama’s Sparkles. So I am going to open up the Actions Pallet Window Actions, and just move it over here. And Mama’s Sparkles is a stand alone product in the Mama’s Sparkle Action, and it is also part of Mama’s Full Blown Studio Portrait Pack number nine in that set.
So let us run these sparkles on this image that already has some of mama’s products supplied and techniques. So I am just going up to the top, set or layer, highlight that. Make sure if it is a group set, that it is collapsed. That would mean the sideways triangle is pointing to the side and not downward. Because if you apply an action, with an expanded set, it will put it stop inside, so we want to make sure that, that is collapsed and I am just going to press Mama’s Sparkles. And click continue, and continue, and continue, and of course, that sets up. I am going to move the Actions Pallet out here, the very familiar group set with the formula and they are for Mama’s Sparkles.
Now, the thing about Mama’s Sparkles is there are certain sizes. So if your image area, the face here, if you want to apply sparkles on the eyebrows, is too large and clumpy, I am going to show you how to resize that. On a smaller resolution image, or one where the area is a smaller, real estate area.
So of course, we use white as the foreground color. And I am just going to brush to reveal some of the sparkles and let me zoom in by pressing spacebar Ctrl on the PC, spacebar command on the Mac. And so I am looking at those sparkles and saying, okay they are a little bit too large.
Now the thing about the group set here is, you can use the Transformation command on it. So just go to edit free transform. And let me zoom out on the document by hitting Ctrl minus on a PC, command minus on Macintosh. Let me expand this out so you can see that the transformation bounding box comes over the whole group set. There are sparkles underneath here that fill up the whole canvas size.
So if I want tot make them smaller, and as not clumpy looking, then just grab a corner handle. Hold Shift to constrain it and just bring it inward. Now I can click in here and move this area around. Now the real estate area of the entire sparkles is only going to be filled to the area with inside of the rectangular box here.
So if you are going to apply sparkles to the other eyebrow, you want to make sure that it is within the bounding box which you can also right click if you are on a PC, or Ctrl click on a Mac, and tell it to rotate. And so this whole area, this square area will have sparkles in it.
So I am just going to commit this right now. And I have made the sparkles smaller. And I am going to fill this mask with black and those are part of my finessing actions. So if you are in the studio portrait pack, you can just come down to the bottom that says, fill current mask with black and press play. And in there regular sparkles action, there is also an action to do the same thing.
So now, I can get my brush zoom in, and use my left bracket key to make that smaller. And paint on sparkles that are smaller and more realistic for the size of the area that I am painting them on. The x key that takes some of that off, like so. And now, I am going to open up the sparkles action and these are demoed in other videos on sparkles and double click on this green one here. I have color coded it for you where it says double click to color the sparkles. So I will double click on that. And I think I am going to get a kind of a blue so I am going to click the gradient here and come over here, and make that kind of bluish purple. Do not go too high up. Remember that blows it out. You have to get it in an area where it has nice color that you want. I am going to click Okay.
And you can change the brightness of it by double clicking on this internal layer of the group set. And if I want to make a little darker, I could do that but I kind of like it right about there. And the contrast really does not have a good effect. So we just leave that it as plus one. And click okay.
Now I am going to use some of the finessing actions which are part of the studio portrait pack and the sparkles pack. And you can also just download the finessing actions for free on the website. They are called, Mama’s finessing actions.
So what I am going to do is shrink this up a bit. So I will come to decrease reveal effect area, press play, and I will get this dialogue box, minimum is not available so I am going to click stop. The reason that I did this and the reason that this occurs, is when you use these finessing actions, you have to make sure that you are highlighted on the group set.
So in order not to get in trouble, I advise collapsing the group set after you have set the color, and the hue, and the contrast for the sparkles, come back up here, and it is not enough just to have the layer slot highlighted. You actually have to click on this thumbnail so an outline appears around it and you see the word Layer Mask on that.
So now, I am going back to the finessing action called decrease revealed effect and that will play, opening up the minimum dialogue box. I will dial in a radius amount. You can see that the area is shrinking up like this and I will click Okay, and continue. And then to make it blend a little better, I will just add a small amount of Gaussian Blur just to make that blend a little bit better.
Okay, I am going to use another finessing action. Again, make sure that the mask is highlighted and it says, layer mask up here. And I am going to add the pop or subdue effect, press play, continue, that opens up levels. And if I want to decrease the effect, move the black slider, increase the effect area, move the white slider. I am going to just leave this like it is and subdue it, moving this white slider makes it blend in to the background quite nicely. So let us zoom out on this. We look at our image here. And that is how to resize Mama’s Sparkles.
I am going to scroll down here and let us look at the original image. I have applied some other of Mama’s products to the image. As you can see, Lip Gloss Optimizer, the composite powder, teeth whitener, rouge lipstick, hair color and eyelashes. One thing I am going to do is move the sparkles group set underneath the lash group set. So I have got to drag that until I see a single line beneath the area, and that way, the lashes are on top of that shadow. So I will scroll down here and we look at before and after by option or Alt clicking on the visibility icon for the background layer, there is the before image, and here is the image after some of mama’s products and techniques. Hope you have enjoyed this instructional video.
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