Photoshop actions are enjoyed by many, and are useful in so many ways.  Whether you want to speed up your workflow, or creatively edit photos, they do come in handy.  Press the Play button and there it goes!  A little miracle of it’s own!  All the layers are there, all you need is adjust a bit, here and there.

Many actions are available for you to choose (Psst!  Right sidebar, easy peasy!), but sometimes, you have that recipe you like, one you created and the one that works for your editing style the best.  How do you record it in order to save it for future use, and also, to save some time?  I’ll walk you through it.  We’ll start by a step-by-step guide on how to actually record the actions.  You have that amazing tool at your fingertips, it’s time you put it to good use!  Then, I’ll add my tips on how to build your own creative actions.  Sounds good?

I have to admit I love gradients in PS (or PSE).  I think it’s one of the neglected tools in your panel.  With gradients you can easily add fill light, contrast, haze, vignette, etc.  It’s easy to use, but you have to select the right gradient and the right blending modes to get the most out of them.

For this tutorial I’ll use a macro of a flower I did, on which I wanted to softly enhance the center.  Please keep in mind that my photo has it’s own color and exposure, yours will obviously be different,  so layer opacity and angle values (we’ll see it soon…) might need to be adjusted to your own image.  This serves only as a reference to make you want to use Gradients in your editing.

In a fantasy world,  I would own a fisheye lens,  but reality is,  I don’t.  So, whenever I want a little fisheye effect in my images,  I have to rely on Photoshop  (It will work in PSE too).   Here’s my photo,  before and after the Fisheye effect.

Here’s the tutorial for this underexposed image.  I could have only corrected the exposure, BUT if you know me, I could not leave it at that.  I needed to make something more, add my artsy touch to it.  So today I’m sharing this editing recipe,  complete steps whether you use PS or PSE,  you’ll get the same results.

Happy New Year everyone!  Wishing you all a wonderful new year, may your dreams and hopes come true,  and may your projects succeed.

For this first post of 2012 I’d like to share  a quick tutorial for Photoshop CS users.

This tutorial will be about a quick and fun way to edit your images by using the Match Color adjustment feature in Photoshop CS  (I haven’t found a way to make the exact same thing in Elements so far,  but I only have PSE7.  So if you have a newer version of PSE and the feature is available,  let us know!).