5 digital darkroom actions
Requirements: Photoshop
OS: PC and Mac Five actions created by Digital Camera’s Technique Editor, Ben Birchall. They’re great for everyday digital darkroom use, making your life easier and, more importantly, improving your pictures. All the adjustments are set to the optimum for boosting your photos and won’t require any tweaking. General corrections
General corrections can be used for your everyday pictures. Using this action will ensure you never forget the most basic adjustments. Levels should be adjusted so the image has good contrast. Top tip: hold down the Alt key while dragging the sliders in the Levels palette to see where the pixels are being clipped. Hue/Saturation is set to +14 on Master, which is a good starting level. Experiment by increasing the slider, making sure to check if the pixels are beginning to show signs of posterisation as saturation is increased. Unsharp Mask is already set to a reasonable default level. Adjusting the percentage of sharpening should be adequate for everyday pictures. Avoid excessively increasing the Threshold and Radius box to avoid harsh edges. Rotate
Rotate is useful for images that come from cameras without an orientation feature that corrects the image so that it’s the right way up when taken in portrait mode. Assigning the rotate action to a function key will make short work when you need to rotate lots of images. Double-click the Rotate action in the Actions box and scroll through the Function key drop-down menu to find a suitable one. Lab sharpening
Lab sharpening ensures that you only sharpen the brightness values of pixels, rather than the colour values. It converts the image to Lab mode then applies the sharpening to the Lightness channel only before converting it back to RGB. Unsharp Mask is already set to a reasonable default level. Avoid excessively increasing the Threshold and Radius box to avoid harsh edges. Red boost
Red boost is great for warming and saturating images with very little red in them or for picking out the vibrant reds. The Hue/Saturation palette is set to a default of +2- for Red and +1 for Master. This is a good starting point. Experimentation is the key and adjusting the Red slider will dictate how much you can increase it before posterisation starts to happen. Blue boost
Blue boost is great for warming and saturating images with very little blue in them or for picking out the cool blues. The Hue/Saturation palette is set to a default of +20 for Blue and +10 for Master. This is a good starting point. Experimentation is the key and adjusting the Blue slider will dictate how much you can increase it before posterisation starts to happen. HOW TO DOWNLOAD
To use our actions, follow these simple steps:
1. Make sure that you have Photoshop installed (you can download a trial from http://www.adobe.co.uk)
2. Select the action set or action you’d like to install.
3. Click on the download link and choose to save the file to a selected destination on your hard drive.
4. Within Photoshop, go to Window>Actions to reveal the Actions palette.
5. Click the Load Actions option, follow the prompts to locate the actions and click OK.
The actions are now ready to use. |
What is an action? Actions are recorded sets of Photoshop commands and processes which can achieve the recorded effects with a single click. They can streamline common image-manipulation tasks and take a great deal of the donkey work out of your day-to-day workflow. Here, you’ll find some exclusive actions for you to download – they’re guaranteed to make your life easier!
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