What are actions?

Basically, actions are a time saving shortcut that performs many steps in just second. Having these techniques performed automatically for you can save a photographer hours of editing time in Photoshop. Actions are created to do a huge variety of differnent tasks … everything from making eyes pop, skin smoother and colors correct to artistic actions like dramatic black and whites, intense color pops or vintage tones.

Best tips for actions?

The first thing I always tell people when trying actions for the first time is “tweak your results.” Not every action will work straight out of the gate on every photo. Individual photos have different tones, exposures, etc. that can affect how an action will look when finished playing. After clicking play on your action you’ll be left with a series of layers … some simple actions will produce just one layer, while other more in depth actions will leave you with many layers to go in and play with. Take a look at what you end up with … turn layers on and off, adjust the opacity slider on each layer, etc. as you watch how each layer affects your image. Maybe your image is too bright? Well, take a look and see if there is a “Make Darker” layer to help adjust this or a “Lighter” layer that you can turn off or lower opacity on. Is your image not showing enough contrast? Take a look through the action’s layers for a contrast layer, sometimes called pop, and adjust this to your liking. Many actions will have layers that are “creative” additions, such as a “Vintage” layer or a “Haze” layer … you can totally customize your look by adjusting these (on/off or changing opacity).

Another recommendation to getting the most from your actions is learning the basics of layer masks. Most layers in your action will also include a “mask,” which can help customize your edit even more. Layer masks are a perfect way to acheive targeted results when running actions. They allow you to have the action’s effect appear on part of the photo, but not the entire image. Using them is also essential for many retouching actions, where you want only a portion of the layer to be affected, such as brightening the eyes. Another example would be where one side of a subject’s face is darkly shadowed. You don’t want to brighten the entire image, so you could take a “Lighten” layer and paint on the layer mask to lighten just that part of the subject’s face. The rule to remember with layer masks is white reveals and black conceals. You’ll paint on the layer mask with white to reveal what the layer does (lighten, color, etc) and paint with black to conceal it.

Doing this extra bit of tweaking at the end of an action will give you a custom look that fits your style and your individual image.

And some examples of before and afters to show some of the looks actions can accomplish with the click of a button or two.

Annie Manning – Paint The Moon

Paint the Moon offers Photoshop actions to help bring new life to your images and take hours off of your editing time. Offering professional editing tools that help you do everything including extensive retouching, essential workflow edits, and beautiful and unique artistic processing. Using Paint the Moon actions will make complicated processing amazingly quick and are a breeze to use. Paint the Moon actions are also highly customizable for just the right look.

Also offering vintage and fine art textures to add a unique and high end look to your final images. Included with every texture purchase is my exclusive Textures Rock action set that makes applying textures and customizing the final look super easy.

Paint the Moon also offers video tutorials to help guide you through the editing process (new ones are now being added weekly) and beautiful free actions and textures to try before you buy.

And my link is http://paintthemoon.net/blog

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