Action Tuesday! Introduction and CoffeeShop Review [131/365]

You folks who blog for a living really have my respect. It took me an insane amount of time to prepare for this week’s Action Tuesday! post. Last Tuesday I posted Playing with Actions and applied various Pioneer Woman Actions to different photos in a single session with Boa. Since discovering Photoshop actions, I’ve enjoyed experimenting with different styles, but I usually play it safe and edit multiple photos in the same session with the same style. (Most of the time, I just use an S-Curve and fiddle with the saturation, levels and sharpness a bit.)

Actions are a really easy way to apply styles to your photos. Make them glow, bump up the saturation, add a vignette, sun flare or a million other variations. I think many photographers have a sore spot within them regarding this level of editing in the digital darkroom. Most of the actions out there go beyond basic tweaking of the photo’s brightness, contrast and color and downright mimics another photography style. If you’d set up that shot differently; if you used another lens, camera, aperture, shutter speed or ISO; maybe if the sun was out instead of clouds; perhaps with the addition of a filter or two or a hood on your lens, then you could have achieved that shot the right way. Hanging out on Flickr in some of the photography and critique groups that take themselves seriously, I ran into this attitude frequently. I think the notion among these photographers is: what’s the point of learning how to shoot if you’re just going to make corrections or mimic specific techniques anyway?

The photography community as a whole may look down on more extreme photo editing in the digital darkroom, but it is without question artistic. There are bound to be respectable artists with talents both in photography and digital editing. Being talented and skilled in one does not negate an ability for the other. Can’t we have the best of both worlds? Take great photos and be able to have some fun with them? Certainly, I want to know how to accomplish it all manually, however my primary point in learning photography is to tell my family’s story in pictures. I reserve the right to take artistic license and make everything look like it’s glowing pink if I feel it tells the story better than my original.

This week I decided to start with CoffeeShop Actions. The site is run by Rita, a stay-at-home mom with a passion for photography and digital editing. She has over 45 actions available for PhotoShop and PhotoShop Elements as well as tutorials, templates and storyboards, textures, brushes and more. It’s a wonderful resource and she is undoubtedly talented!

Like the moron I am, I couldn’t start with just one or two, I had to download all of her actions. Then, both because I am used to Pioneer Woman’s actions and because I love organization, I grouped all her actions in similar set categories and removed “Coffee Shop” from the specific action name since my set name includes it. The process of downloading, installing and rearranging all the actions took a good two hours. If you’re going to install a lot of single actions, I highly recommend taking the time to organize it.

As Installed

After organizing

Finally having everything in order, I started playing around with her actions. Right away I notice the prompts give a lot more detail and instruction for use than Pioneer Woman or some of the others I’ve used. She tells you which layers to adjust to accomplish different results. There’s also her blog URL on every prompt so you kind of can’t forget where you got it from. I’m having some technical difficulty with some actions (like telling me it can’t find the “Background” layer even though there is a background layer) but I will chalk that up to user error since she has extensive instructions on using each action on her blog and I haven’t RTFM yet. Overall, the actions are easy to use and adjust. I’m used to all the layers being grouped together after the action is complete and CoffeeShop’s actions don’t do this. That will take some getting used to or I may learn how to edit actions to have them do this for myself. It’s nice to have all the layers grouped together because then you can apply multiple actions and toggle visibility to chose which ones to keep or combine. I can still do this manually, so no biggie.

The first one I tried out is a retouching action called, Glamour Glow. It gives your portrait a porcelain smooth complexion. I tried it on a photo of Boa and I was really pleased with the 5 minute results!

Original Photo.

With Glamour Glow action

After that, I decided to play around with the yellow and green colors in his shirt and whatever that is in the background by applying the Creamy Toffee Latte action over top of that. It softens the photo and makes the yellow and green colors pop. Why should they? I have no idea, I’m experimenting.

Original Photo.

With Glamour Glow and Creamy Toffee Latte actions

Finally, I decided I wanted to give the whole photo a retro look. There’s nothing too special about it, it’s actually a tad on the dark side anyway, so I applied the Honey Retro action and turned the light burn layer to 100% opacity.

Here are a couple of other experiments.

Perfect Portrait is a good option to get your portraits coming out looking great. I didn’t get a chance to play with all the layer adjustments, but you can make eyes pop, soften skin and whiten teeth!

CoffeeShop doesn’t have very many black and white actions available. This one is Splendor Coffee. I also used dodge on the right side of Boa’s face since it fell too much in the shadows.

It was fun to play around with some new actions, though I feel I didn’t give her actions the attention they deserved. They are very powerful and allow the user to completely customize the results. I will continue to play around with what I’ve downloaded and I’ll be sure to share any interesting results!

All Photos Taken Today

Check some of these out for other CoffeeShop actions applied. The action name is in the title.