Basic Actions

Photoshop Actions

This page contains a basic 'toolkit' of downloadable Photoshop (photographic) Actions which you will 
find useful to 
improve your pictures and fix most of those annoying problems.

You can either run them 'blind' or try and understand how they work.  They are aimed at improving snapshots as well as more serious images.

You will find that by just running the right Action (at the tight time!) you can improve most of your pictures almost without having to do anything else.  The exception is the initial adjustment to set the full tonal range of the image - so you need to do Image>Adjustments>Auto Levels (I'll show all Photoshop menu selections, and specific features, in italics) at a minimum, but really you should adjust them yourself, with Levels or Curves, to get better results.

However as well as fixing things it is equally important how you go about it.  I therefore describe a method to ensure that you get the best possible results regardless of which Photoshop facility or Actions you use.

An image is made up of two attributes, ignoring the subject and composition etc.:-

Tones 
Colours

Unless, tongue in cheek, you are a woman who can do two things at once, it should be fairly obvious that we have more chance of success if we do one thing at a time, especially if we are not experts, rather than try and adjust everything at the same time.  Thus we should tackle the tones of an image independently of the colour.  Back in my early days of photography we used various filters to enhance the B&W pictures we took to increase the contrast (tones) of the image in the areas that were important.  So for important images, try and correct Tones first and then adjust for Colour - doesn't matter too much for snapshots, but getting into the habit of a structured order of doing adjustments is not a bad thing.

I find PhotoShop Actions extremely useful - not only to repeat tasks, but also as a way of doing things that I might forget.  There is an additional benefit that trying to work out how an action works will help one learn post-processing techniques.  For instance the Improve Weak Sky action (which works without selecting the sky!)  becomes obvious when you start looking at the Red channel of landscape images - but that is a little more advanced and we will tackle that later.

Let me say again - You have more chance of getting the best out of your image if you do the changes in a pre-defined order; for instance sharpening should always be the last step and paying attention to contrast should be done before enhancing the colours.  So try and follow this order, even if you do not have to use any of the Actions!

Most of these Actions will "over-do" the effect, so that you can/will alter the Opacity of the Blend to suit.  Some may require Masks or BlendIF changes when there are side effects on bits of the image you don't want altered.

Here is an outline of what they do, and sometimes there is a "[more]" link, which will popup a window giving further details, examples and sometimes a little help on using them...