For Tristan Brown (@tris.x), photography became more than just a way to document her life, but also a path for her to express her creativity.  Her portraits exude the rawest of emotive characteristics while her color palette and tonal preferences give her images a signature feel.  She uses Mextures to apply subtle strokes of light and contrast without affecting the overall mood of her work.  Tristan was kind enough to provide us with a walkthrough of her Mextures process for a few of her images.  Read below to learn along with us!

FORMULA CODE: TYNBBSI

For the fall series I did with Brooke, I wanted to exaggerate the orange.  Forestry is my favorite Landscape Enhance and Vintage is my favorite Vintage Gradient so I usually try to start my editing process with those two and then go from there.  Luckily, my top favorite overlays fit perfectly in this image so they were the only ones I felt I should use.  Both of them intensified the orangey color scale I desired and I felt I should just polish the image off in the adjustments section!

FORMULA CODE: DUDTGIB

With this image of Leah, I wanted to create an edit that would show the mood I felt the picture craved.  I wanted to cool down the colors with blues and purples, producing more of a dark, mystical ambience.  I immediately knew I would use either Waterfront or Eventide because both have a purple exuberance. I chose Eventide in the end because I didn't want any warm yellow tones grazing her skin. Since the image was already fairly dark, I felt that less was more and just finished it off with a few adjustments.

FORMULA CODE: RLFHAFT

For this photo of Brooke, I wanted to represent the color red. Not just with her hair and makeup, but also in my editing approach.  I chose the reddest-toned layers available such as Dreary and Summer Setting from the Landscape Enhance pack to add warmth and intensified the red tones with the Punch film preset.  I finished my edit by cooling down her skin tones with the temperature adjustment.

See more of Tristan’s imagery here!