Clean Edit Photoshop Action

Over the past several months, I’ve noticed myself starting the photo editing process the same way with each shot. I adjust the levels and try out an S-Curve. Recently, thanks to Shoot and Edit with Ashley and Jill, I’ve added the high pass filter trick to my clean edits.

I do these three things so consistently with each of my photographs that I decided to make a Photoshop action of my own to quicken this process. And since I love to share these dorky things I do, I also want to make this action available for you to try! I use Photoshop CS3 on Windows Vista, so I can’t promise the action will work in any other version (but I don’t see why it wouldn’t.) It definitely should not work for Elements.

Out of the Box Examples

Below are a few shots with only the Clean Edit action applied as-is. While I heartily recommend customizing the results to cater to your particular image, I’ve had good results just running the action. Hover over the image or click on it to see the straight out of the camera version.

Customization

Chances are, you’ll probably want to customize the results for the specific image you’re working on. There are a couple of ways to do this and they’re all super simple! This action creates three layers which accomplish different things:

1. Teeny Tiny S-Curve is the Curves adjustment layer.
2. Goodbye Fog: Levels is the Levels adjustment layer.
3. Clarity is the high pass filter trick set at Soft Light blending mode, 39%

A layer mask is attached to each individual layer and the DW Clean Edit group as a whole to make it easy for you to remove the effect from part of your shot. For each of these, you can also adjust the opacity to customize your results. You can also click on the box with the little eye in it to the left of each layer to hide it altogether (or show it, in the case of the noise reduction layer).

I recommend taking a closer look to make sure the Levels and Curves adjustments especially are set up to compliment your image.

Goodbye Fog

To customize this, click on the icon that looks like a histogram in the Goodbye Fog layer. It’ll pop up your Levels Adjustment settings.

Adjust the sliders as you wish. I take a look at the histogram and if it isn’t nice and even like this one, I pull the sliders in at each side until it’s right under where the histogram data starts on that side. Ashley’s Shoot and Edit tutorial today includes a very helpful video on levels adjustment.

When the histogram is evenly filled out like this, I still pull the sliders in just a little on each side and adjust the mid-tone slider to my eye’s taste.

S-Curve

Click on the graph-like icon which will bring up the Curves Adjustment settings.

Here I’ve used the Preset Linear Curve for slight contrast, but that’s not going to work for all images. I normally set the first point slightly below the diagonal line near the left-most side (shadows) of the histogram data. I set the right point slightly above the diagonal line at the right-most side (highlights) of the histogram data. You can just pick up and drag these points wherever you’d like or click on them and delete them altogether to start over.

Customized Examples

Here are a couple of shots showing the results of running the action and customizing the results as explained above. Again, mouse over the image or click on it to see the straigh out of the camera shot.

Download the Action!

If you’d like to try this out, please be my guest!

The action is now part of a set available here: Seven Free Photoshop Actions.

If you download this and use it, please leave me a comment! If it doesn’t work for you, I’d love to know which version of Photoshop you’re using, though I cannot promise I can make it work in your version.