Brian Auer from the Epic Edits blog is putting on a pretty cool contest/project/collaboration expirement. He’s encouraging us to share our actions and presets as a group so that … as he puts it …
our collective creativity will be pooled into a large Styler Package and be distributed freely
As for prizes, Neil from MakeLightReal has offered up some pretty good ones. I am excited about the prospect of a prize (however remote it might be for me), but I’m really hoping the resulting action and preset library will be a great resource to help push my photographic abilities a bit higher.
So, one of the actions I’ve created and use a ton is a little “color pop” action I made after reading a blog post somewhere (sorry, I can’t remember the source) about using the LAB space to pop your color without artifacting.
So here it is … LAB Color Fix
Using it is very simple. Open an image and run the action. You’ll be left with a really ugly visible image layer on top of your original. Simply slide the opacity down until you like the look. Usually a value between 20% and 30% gives the best results. Flatten … save … done.
Anyway, hopefully somebody finds this useful. I know this one isn’t rocket science … but I sure have found it useful and a timesaver.
Here’s an example of the difference …
Great work Tom! This is exactly the kind of stuff we were hoping for — good useful actions that save time and get the job done. Thanks for participating in the project — I checked it out and it looks great. If you come up with any more actions or presets, multiple entries are welcome!
[...] other entries included a color pop Photoshop Action from Tom Weeks, a Flickr resizer Photoshop Action from me, and a 300 movie style Lightroom Preset [...]