Check out the 10 Photoshop Actions that I love the most when I’m retouching images in Photoshop! In this Photoshop tutorial, I go through ten Photoshop Actions that I built that I love using while retouching images. Make sure you download the action pack right away! We’ll cover Frequency Separation, Hair Retouching, Eye Retouching, Skin and Blemish Removal, Dodging and Burning, Creating a Lens Flare, Smart Grain to Blend Color and Tone, and more!
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE ACTION PACK
Let’s take a look at five of the ten actions in this download and I’ll give you a quick rundown of the action and how I use it!
Frequency Separation Action
This one if the granddaddy of them all! To be able to quickly set up the layers and functions needed to get a frequency separation takes a few minutes and sometimes is difficult to remember. No worries with this action! You’ll be up and running with your own frequency separation in no time flat with this action!
Eye Retouching Action
Like many of the actions in this set, you’ll see that this set of layers and Adjustment Layers is always to same when I retouch eyes and anything that I can automate I try to. We have a layer for cleaning up blemishes on the whites of the eyes, options to brighten or darken parts of the eyes, and even a couple layers to add additional catchlights into the top or bottom of the subject’s eye. Check out the video to see exactly how I work with this action!
Dodge and Burn Action
The two layers that I almost always create when I decide to do some dodging and burning are two Curves layers. This action drops those layers in place, sets them to the proper blend modes to make sure they brighten/darken correctly and then apply black layer masks so you can jump right in and start dodging and burning by simply painting white in either of the masks. Check out the video to see all the tricks I use to get great dodging and burning in my images.
Lens Flare Action
This action is a great time-saver because I find myself playing with flares in my photos, but creating them time after time can be annoying and time-consuming because it’s a step fo the process that can easily be automated. With this action, it’s one-click flare action and it’s just amazing. Tweak the Hue/Saturation layer to get different colored flares and adjust the Opacity and Fill Opacity of the layers to set the intensity of the flare.
Video Game Tones Action
I love this action because it gives this thick, dry, moody tone to your image. I’ve found that it works particularly well with landscape and outdoor portrait photos. When you apply this action it is very important that when the Calculations dialog box is triggered that you choose to output the results to a New Document (VERY IMPORTANT!) Run this action and play with the layers which it outputs to get lots of different color and tone mixtures for your images!
As with every tutorial outline that I write, make sure you watch the full video above to see all the details and how I use each of these actions to help me retouch and clean up my photos. Also, make sure you download the actions above! No need to sign up for the newsletter to get this download, I just ask for a little social media “payment” in the form of a share! Thanks!
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