Although I do not use Photoshop actions very often, they are very convenient for simple tasks you perform often and complicated tasks you often get wrong. The two actions I am making available will perform the rather extensive steps of creating a digital lomography effect and the few simple steps to give images a wet floor reflection.
The lomography action
I have a thing with the look of photos taken with a crappy camera on traditional film. The lomography or lomo effect adds a level of intimacy to photos and especially the sunny shots get a real atmosphere boost. While I’ve come across and tested many of the lomo, lomoize and lomofy actions out there, very few have that intensity that I am looking for. Those that do don’t really produce a set of layers that can be tweaked afterwards.
Here on the left is the original photo taken by my friend Maarten on one of his trips to South America. I chose this as it has a nice contrast between the sky and the canopy so you can see what the action does to light and dark material.
The action has two steps. One that includes a vignette, color adjustments, dirt, blurring at the outer edges and some other tweaks. The second step takes it up a notch and brings down the lightest spots, does more color adjustments, adds extra noise and fakes the lens distortion. After the first step there are also two extra color adjustment layers added that can be applied to give the photo a warmer or cooler look.
On the left you see the result of the first phase. Once that is done you can choose to continue, which results in something like the image on the right. Download the action below. You will most likely need Photoshop CS or higher to correctly execute the action.
The wet floor action
A whole different effect is the wonderfully web two-point-oh-ish wet floor effect. Not much of a challenge, but since I use it for the images at this site it’s nice to be able to get it done with one click. Once you’ve applied the action you end up with three layers: the image, the reflection and the background. That makes it easy to replace the background or boost the opacity of the reflection.
Above the results of the three actions. Besides the regular action I’ve added two extra actions that slightly turn the image inward. The only downside is that the degree of rotation is very small for small images and rather large for big images. Still this action saved me loads of time and I’m sure they can do the same for you.
Leave a reaction
Keep it decent and to the point.