Q/A Suggestions for Actions/Presets

Or you could always experiment with different mediums. iPhone of D3 camera back.

Q: Hope you are keeping well. Still enjoy so many of your images.

My photoshop skills are improving a lot, but still finding I'm missing an edge. I use the curves a lot I got from your workshop, the velvesqia, proviaesque and so on. I find they are very useful. I really like a cleaned up image but then with the look of film or a colour over the top. Still playing around with photoshop for this but keen to see effects already out here.

Im not asking for your own actions or curves (but if you had some ....) but wanting to know of other websites or photogs who might have them or any other actions I could try and play with.

Thanks for your help.

A: Happy to hear that your PS skills are improving! I don't have any Photoshop actions that I use. The only thing that I do that is close to a "canned action" is that I sometimes drag and paste adjustment layers from an older file (from a different shoot) and drop them onto the new image. Usually this gets me going a new direction but requires many subsequent adjustments.

I'm not sure if any such actions exist out there that would satisfy your criteria. It sounds like you're looking for specific looks but at the same time you're not exactly sure what you're looking for? Or do you know what looks you want to recreate and you're just having trouble getting from A to B? If you aren't sure what you want to create I'd suggest first collecting a few images that you like (from the Internet, magazines, etc.) then you can try and "backsolve" them. But if you do know the end product/look, then it's a matter of reverse engineering the look via lighting, shooting, Photoshop. I can assist with that via a private workshop. During the workshop we could look through the various files I have on my computer and I can show you step-by-step how I get those looks.

The other suggestion I have is to look through Lightroom presets like http://www.presetsheaven.com and http://www.lightroompresets.com and see if you can grab any canned presets from there to play with?

Hope this helps! Great hearing from you!