It’s been a while since I wrote something on this site. Some times the creativity just disappears – but, people of the world, REJOICE. The creativity is back. The first post right now will focus on editing workflow and more specific about Photoshop actions.
Just to recap everyone: Actions is a tool to ‘record’ steps and actions in Photoshop and then play them back, thus speeding up certain things. I’ve always done things the manual way, except a few thing such as frequency seperation, high pass sharpen and a few other techniques.
SleekLens created a whole bunch of Photoshop actions and Lightroom presets. They approached me and asked if I wanted to try out their product. (They actually also offer an editing service)
I never really believe in the “one size fits all” approach, but of course is it possible to speed up trivial tasks with actions.
So I found two old portraits to try out the actions on – one environmental and one from the studio. These are the two picture straight out of Lightroom, so no corrections except basic exposure. I’ll discuss the workflow and process one at a time.
The environmental portrait
The SleekLens pack has “so called” base actions. I applied the “From cloudy days” base, which actually really created a nice base for the future edit, however not all bases work great on all pictures – it’s the whole “one size” thing.
I used my spot healing tool to spot heal the minor things and went on to correct some color temperature and adjust the reds with an actions. I then applies the “Fast retouch action”. WOW! That is a great action. It created masked layers for your basic corrections such as eyes, teeth, sharpening of the eyes and skin smoothening. Its a great base for a quick edit, not that you couldn’t create it without the action. I should mention that the action to smooth out the skin kills ALL texture – in this case I would prefer the Frequency Seperation (more on the below).
Some final touches and here’s the result:
The studio portrait
So the actions clearly provided a quick base for the environmental shoot, but it comes in a bit short when it comes to the studio shoot.
I used the “From scratch” base and did my spot healing the old fashioned way. I used the frequency seperation action (it sure do look a lot like Phlearns frequency seperation action..?) to correct the skin tones. I used the AMAZING “fast retouch” action to get the basic correction layers.
When it came to the colouring I really struggled with making the colour actions fit this image. It seems like, the colour actions fit bedst with the environmental “Dani Diamond” style portrait.
Drum roll… And the result:
The two cents
There really are a few good actions in the pack, but (as mentioned) this works best with environmental portraits and its clearly not a “one size fits all” action bundle. The fast retouch action is a great idea, and SleekLens should create more actions like that one.
I experienced some stacking issues with many of the actions. Stacking of the actions is essential to me, as I ALWAYS work non-destructive in Photoshop. And it is an issues when an action suddenly packs all your layers into a folder, or worse: flattens layers!
The bundle is called Portrain Perfection Collection and can be found on the SleekLens website.
(SleekLens provided the action bundle free of charge, but all the opinions are my own)