My Favorite Photoshop Actions - Part 2

A few weeks ago I told you about some of my favorite (free) Photoshop actions. In addition I mentioned my actions from Paint the Moon and Flora Bella, but said I'd come back and give you more details.

So, now I'm back with some more information for you.

I really like the Paint the Moon action sets and I wanted to invest in one that had some fun, color pop actions, but that also included helpful, workflow type actions.

So I decided on the Picture Perfect Portrait Mega Set. It's a little pricy, but I'm pretty sure I used a coupon, and I would say that it's worth it even at full price.

I use many of the artistic touches regularly. My favorites are Creamy Haze and Sweet Prairie (Vintage).





The Sweet Prairie on landscapes can be absolutely beautiful. I love it. They're all very tweakable, but I often find that these are just right.





I also love it on portraits:






Also included in the set is a a group of resizing and sharpening actions and "helping hands" that includes a fast rounded corners action that's great for web sized images.

I use her sharpen and resize for web for almost all the photos on my blog. I love that the sharpen layer has a mask and I can easily adjust the opacity.

This action really speeds up my publishing to the web.

Flora Bella's actions are fun and kind of whimsical. They're a little heavy for my style so I usually end up tweaking them a lot. I almost always have to turn down the contrast. But they're all beautiful.

Here's an example:





I cleaned up some of the dirt off his face (how does that happen??) and ran Milk at full opacity, with the contrast turned way down. I then ran Swoon at 20% to give it a little bit of a pop.

One of the things I like most about their actions is that so many of them work well together.

I lean more toward clean edits so I don't use these as much as some of my other favorites, but I like having the option to add a little more of an artistic touch if a photo calls for it.

Do you have any favorites to share?

Edited to add:
I didn't know Annie from Paint the Moon was going to be featured at www.my3boybarians.com today, but what a timely post! If you're coming over from Sweet Shot Tuesdays, welcome!