I’ve used actions for a very long time in photoshop, in fact I couldn’t keep track of half of the actions I had set up within the last 5 years. But it wasn’t until more recently that I realized just how powerful an action can be. These actions can range anywhere from quick rotates to lengthy photo layouts that create the entire product from start to finish with only a couple of keystrokes from the user. Below I’ll cover a couple of the quirks that will hopefully help you while building your own.

In the screen shot above you can see the block to the left of the command in this action. This block turns the dialog on and off, anytime you set a command that can be controlled by the user you’ll see this option. By default they are turned off. This can be anything from “open” as shown above to layer opacity, filters, transforming images and so on. When the dialog is turned off the actions runs through with whatever commands you gave it, but when turned on the user has the option of changing these settings to their liking. This comes in really handy when adjusting colors, placing images, or setting levels. You can’t always depend on the original input to work with every image and that’s where this really helps.

In this image you’ll notice the first option is checked off and the second one is left blank. This will disable certain commands within your action. This will help when troubleshooting actions or creating long actions to include every possible element that you would want in your final outcome. In this particular action I set up a layout to have multiple options for a background in an image. I can then go back and control what option I would like to use for that certain image without having to create two separate actions that essentially do the same thing.

Here is a little quirk that I recently ran into while creating some photo layouts. The image above shows “set work path” in the action. When you’re recording an actions and running through your steps the action doesn’t record your work path while using the pen tool into the action. What you have to do is create your path as you normal, when you’ve drawn out the path select the palette options menu in the top left of the palette. In this drop down you’ll see the option to “Insert Path” click here and it will record your pen tool input into the action.

In this same menu you can also stop and start your action while working on it. This really helps if you just need to take a break or maybe to get something set up that’s needed for the action but that you don’t want recorded.

There’s always much more to learn when it comes to actions but hopefully this will set the ball rolling for some to start diving into actions and seeing what you can create. I hope I’ve shed some light on actions for some of you and please, feel free to ask questions if you would like help on something.

First, I’d like to apologize for the long break. I’ve been out of town over Thanksgiving and it’s been quite busy around here. I’ve been playing around with Livebrush lately and it’s been a fun tool to have in the arsenal. If you haven’t already found it head over now to check it out!

This brush pack includes 5 brushes of various fractal snowflakes. Here’s a preview of what you’re getting.

Fractal Snow by gwip

As always these are free to use both personally and commercially, all I ask is that you don’t sell them as your own. Credits are always welcome but by no means necessary.

Click to download brushes.

I hope you enjoy! Click the image below for a preview.

Tiled brushes by gwip Design.

Click to download brushes.

I’ve had a few questions on ways to use Photoshop brushes, particularly the grunge brushes. While this may be common knowledge to experienced users, this post is aimed at new users and maybe give a different perspective of the brush palette to the more experienced users.

Start by setting your foreground and background colors to the main hues that you’d like your background to represent. Next, select a detailed, high res grunge brush. If you need a good brush you can download my set here or check out the many free brushes somewhere like Brusheezy.

Once you have your brush selected set up your brush palette as shown below. We’ll start with the Shape Dynamics. We’re really only concerned with the Angle here, this will assure that your brush has some variety too it.

Next is the Scattering, pretty self explanatory. Here we’re making sure the brush isn’t clumped together leaving big spots.

Now your Dual brush, here you’ll want to select another grunge brush of similar size.

To end we’ll set up the Color options, this is where you can play a little bit. You’re main concerns are the saturation and hue. This will give you the variance in color depending on what your looking for.

That’s it, we’re done setting everything up. All you need to do now is make a few quick swipes over your canvas and within seconds you’ll have a unique grunge background.

Click below to see what I ended with.

Let’s get a quick rundown on what’s included here. Up first is “Clarity”, meant to cut through the haze on your images and boost colors with an added tonal range. This action really likes scenic shots and doesn’t fair so well on people. Don’t let this discourage you from experimenting though. You will see your best results from wide open scenic shots with a bit of haze to them.

Click image for a higher resolution sample.

Next is “FakeR”, no that’s not a typo. This action began life as a fake HDR action but didn’t quite live up to it’s name. On some particular images you’ll still see that effect but overall it just adds a very high tone range with strong contrast and a bit of desaturation. FakeR works well on a multitude of images including people but you’ll see the best results on images that aren’t too light. This effect tends to wash out bright spots so be careful with that.

Here’s your preview.

There you go, my first two released actions. I hope everyone enjoys them and as I said, be sure to stick around for more later.

Download Actions

Among some of the many useful tools in the Lab Color space, you can make selective color modifications or reverse the effects of color cast. Lab is a very powerful tool and I’d like to cover some of those other uses another time. For now though, we will focus on basic editing functions utilizing Lab color.

Choose a photo that you think could use a little boost and I promise you’ll be pleased with the results. In fact I’ve found images that I thought to be of good color and tone to really come to life after these easy steps. I’m going to start with this landscape image of housing nestled into the surrounding mountains. This is a stock image from CG Textures, you can find one there or use your own to follow this tutorial.

Start by changing the color mode of your images to Lab Color. (Image > Mode > Lab Color)

From here you’ll want to bring up your levels adjustment (Ctrl+L). I like to bring my sliders into the edges of my histogram then edit my mid levels to my liking. The lightness levels are purely personal preference so go with what you feel makes your image look best.

Notice if you look at the channel in your levels control that you are editing the “Lightness” channel. Instead of editing individual color ranges Lab color utilizes three different areas. As we covered you have “L” or lightness channel, next is “A” this channel represents your magenta/cyan color values, last we have “B” representing the blue/yellow color values.

Now we start on the color, switch to channel A at the top of your levels control. If you aren’t careful here you can get some really odd color shifting. To minimize this effect make sure you bring in your sliders equal amounts on the high and low side to get your baseline. It’s best to tweak color shifts after you’ve set your baseline for your A and B channels. You can do this by tweaking the middle slider for minor color shifts.

When editing my color channels I like to bring in the slider that has the least amount of room to play with. The farther you bring in your sliders the more intensity you will get from that color range. This is useful if you have certain colors in your image that seem to over power everything else. To back off that color range all you need to do is tone that channel down a bit. Look at the image above, I like to bring my slider into a nice even number. Your histogram values range from 0-255, notice my right side has been moved into 190. That means I moved in 65 from the original color setting. So just type in 65 on the other side and your color range is balanced for that channel.

Do the same for B and check the color of your image. If you have color problems such as a red shift, go back to channel A and start with your mid slider, if the color is more in the highlights or just a slight color shift this should do the trick. If it’s a deeper shift or an overall color shift you may have to tweak your high and low sliders. Just be careful not to over do it here. If you’ve color balanced your camera and your settings are correct, 9 times out of 10 you won’t have to touch the high and low sides after your initial adjustments.

That does it for the color settings of this tutorial, you can end here or follow along to give your images a little more edge. There are of course other methods for editing the color utilizing Lab but I’ll cover that at a later time.

Alright, let’s move on. After we’ve set our colors and are happy with the outcome lets move on to sharpening our images. Open your Channels palette and select the lightness channel.

This will show you the light and dark areas of your image, basically just a black and white image. Since we aren’t editing the color channels you can bump up the sharpening all you want and still not have any color artifacts that you would get with other color spaces. This is one of the big advantages of Lab Color. The more sharpening you introduce the more likely you are to get a halo effect although Lab color gives you a little more lead way before you will see this versus RGB/CMYK. Let’s start sharpening, go to Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask and play around a bit to get your desired effect. You can really bring out texture here if you get crazy with the sharpening or you can just clean up the edges a bit with a mellow sharpening pass. My tendencies are to lean towards a bit more sharpening to give images a little edge.

We’re at another good stopping point but you can still get a bit more out of this image before we’re done. Let’s adjust our curves to bring out a little more contrast. Click back on Lab in your channels palette to bring us back to our full image and allow us to move on to the curves. Notice how much you have already brought out of your image with such little effort. When you get the hang of this process it takes only a matter of seconds to get to this point.

Now bring up your curves adjustment. Make sure your back in the full image by clicking Lab in the channels palette and go to Image > Adjustments > Curves. (or Ctrl+M) To bring out a little more contrast make a slight S curve by clicking on the curve and selecting two more points as shown below. The amount of contrast is going to depend on the image but don’t be afraid to experiment here.

And that’s it, there’s no better way to edit your images and get a better look in such a short time. Once you are comfortable with this process it should take you no more then 30-45 seconds to make all of your images look amazing. So how does your image compare to the original? Here’s my final outcome, click to see a higher res image.

Lab color is the way to go when trying to give your images the edge over the competition and we’ve just scratched the surface of what it has to offer. I hope you have found this tutorial helpful, I’ll be covering other aspects of Lab color down the road.