{Feature Friday Photoshop Actions l Seattle Wedding Photographer}

Well it’s that time again…..does anyone think that the weeks go by too quickly?  I wake up and it’s Monday and then all of a sudden it’s Friday again!  This weeks topic is going to be about Photoshop actions that I love.  To me Photoshop is my digital darkroom, just like film photographers use the darkroom to develop and bring out their style of photography, so too, does Photoshop work for digital photographers.

A little background- I started loving photography back in 2001 when digital first became available to the masses.  Before I started using Photoshop, I used Jasc Paint Shop Pro, which is very similar to Photoshop.  So I’ve been working with images and the “digital darkroom” for  quite a while.  You’ll see a LOT of debate out there on whether to use actions or not, but this Feature Friday post is MY opinion on actions.

I use actions to enhance my photos.  I know what I see through my viewfinder and with my own eye and I try to get each of my images from each session I do, to reflect what my eyes saw and what the feeling of the session was.  Texture can add to that feeling, color can as well as well as black and white conversions.  Today I’m going to show a few “before” and “after” images to show what I’m talking about.  Actions for me shorten my post production time.  I’m a photographer first, and although I understand what’s going on when I use ying/yang from Totally Rad Actions (dodging and burning) it’s faster for me to get to the final result by using an action.  I guess that’s what I’d like anyone reading this to take home with them……actions are great tools to help you deliver your final product to the client.

Ok, so let’s get started.  If you’ve been around here any longer than 10 minutes, you’ll know that I love Totally Rad Actions.  I have all of their collections and I love each one of them.  One of the reasons I love them so much is that all of thier actions are customizable- meaning I can control the strength, I can combine them into different “recipes”, and my MOST favorite thing about these actions is that it doesn’t flatten your image when I’m running certain actions and they’re fast.  I have some other actions that do this and it bothers me because I like to see all my layers and tweak them how I want the image to look.  I also use two actions from Kubota actions quite a bit.  I’ll explain below…..

So first let’s talk about the actions that I use a LOT……like on almost every photo a lot.  I’ll list them and tell you what I use them on and give examples.

1.  Daily Multivitamin from Kubota Actions:  This action is something I run on ALL of my images when I’m converting from RAW to JPEG.  It just gives an extra little boost.  Here’s an example

As you can see, it just gives the image a little pop and a good starting place before I start fully re touching.  Here you can see Ashley’s colors have more contrast and richness.  So I love this action because it gives me a great base after my RAW edits are done, to start the other creative edits.

I show my clients actual proofs for most of their images.  I will fully edit my favorites from a session so that people can see the difference between a “proof” and a fully retouched image.  I say retouched instead of edited because in all actuality I do edit each and every one of my images.  That’s what happens in the RAW edit stage.

2.  Ying/Yang from Totally Rad Actions: This is another one of those staple actions that I use on all of my images.  All fully edited images get a little Ying/Yang love from me.  All it is, is a selective dodging and burning tool without changing your ACTUAL image.  Here’s an example of using Ying/Yang

ok, as you can see here I lightened up her skin just a little bit and then I darkened the background a little to emphasize the subject.  Using light in the real world AND light in photoshop can make all the difference in your images.  So this image above is turning out nicely and I haven’t really done that much to the image, just enhanced it a bit.

3. Select-o-Sharp from Totally Rad Actions: I don’t know if Doug made this action directly from my input, but when he had the forum for Totally Rad, he had asked for what people were looking for in actions.  I responded that I would LOVE to have an action where you could selectively choose the area you want to sharpen in an image and “paint” on the sharpness rather than use the unsharp masks, etc in photoshop.  This action works GREAT for me as you’ll see in the example below.  I use this all the time on eyes and then sometimes in my ring shots for weddings.

You can play around with the opacity of the brush you want to use with this action.  But as you can see it makes a huge difference and as I like to have my eyes very sharp in my portraits, I use it all the time……..

3.  Pro Retouch from Totally Rad Actions:  This action is one the I absolutely love.  It helps skin look the best it can without much effort and I get to control how strong it is with my own brush.  I do have other skin smoothing plug ins, but for the most part, I use Pro Retouch for almost everything.  If you’d like a tutorial on how to use this action better, click HERE for Doug Boutwell’s tutorial on Pro Retouch and click on Pro Retouch.  Again just using Ashley’s image from above here’s a before and after using ProRetouch and the Eye Bump that comes with that:

so those are the actions that I use in almost all of my images they’re part of my post production workflow .  Other actions I use a lot are:

Pool Party, Green With Envy, Big Blue, POS Lens, F-zero, Select-o-Pop, EZ Burn, A Better Web Sharpen, and now TRA’s Dirty Pictures for any texture I want to use in images.

Here a few before and afters…..Proof images vs. Fully Retouched images:

There you have it…..I’d love to know if you use actions and what your favorite ones are.  Leave a comment with some of your favorite things to use to stamp your style on your images.  Happy Friday and have a great weekend