In Pursuit of Excellence - 3
My process of developing photographic skills is ongoing, the skills I'm acquiring fall broadly fall into two categories. Production (which are all the processes involved in getting out there with a camera). And 'post production' what happens after they're in the camera bag. For me this is done in my computer. My reality is I'm a part time photographer and full time Digital Artist. I spend far more hours in front of a monitor than is healthy and last thing I plan to do after 12 hours on the digital coalface is sit down and do a further 8 when I get home. Time has become my most precious resource and so I'm always on the lookout for things that might speed up my workflow. Especially when it comes to post processing on my computer. Frustratingly I've found the most capable programmes have the slowest workflows. I love photoshop but sometimes avoid processing my images in it, as I find it slow.
I use presets in a variety of other softwares and I’ve grown to appreciate them. I’m not limited to them, but it gets me in the ‘ballpark’ of where I want. One of the most powerful workflow speedups in photoshop are 'actions'. Simply put‘actions’ are a recorded sequence of processes. An example could be to adjust brightness, contrast and saturation to create a graded image. But actions in photoshop can be any of the complex adjustments within the toolset of photoshop.
Sadly photoshop doesn't come with lots of useful preset 'actions'. Which frankly seems remiss of them. However other people have noted the absence and made them commercially available.
A set of actions which is of interest to me, is the set of landscape actions created by Sleeklens. To be candid anything that speeds my workflow and reduce my time gazing at a monitor is worth a go, consequently I was keen to try these out when I got the chance.
Installing the actions was a doddle and then I hit a small hurdle. The descriptive names are good, but I really didn’t know what each of the actions would do unless I ran it. Given there are more than 50 in the landscape actions in their landscape set. A hit and hope approach could be slower than my usual workflow. To just have the actions and their names felt insufficient to get an idea how they would influence an image. Obviously this problem diminishes as you use them. But it can be a bit daunting when faced with so many options.
A solution I’ve seen and used before has been to create a reference crib sheet with previews on a default image. I couldn’t find one for these actions, so I created one. Or rather I created two which cover most of the presets which interest me. One crib sheet deals with the ‘7 sky’ oriented actions. So I chose to an image with a big sky, and a complex cloud structure. (yes there are 9 images but 2 of them are identical RAW versions with no actions) My other crib sheet deals the 42 other landscape actions.(yes there are 44 in this composite, once again 2 are raw images). For this I simply walked out of the door and took a photo of the park in front of me. The reference sheet looks quite useful And with some solid starting points for image grading the chances are good that some of these actions will become a part of my regular workflow, which means I shall be working more regularly in photoshop.
update on the 7 Jan 2017
I had the opportunity to do some photography over the festive season, this is one I processed using sleeklens filter "Morning Light". Appropriate given it was taken early in the morning.
'sleeklens' products are available at.
https://sleeklens.com/product/landscape-adventure-photoshop-actions/
https://sleeklens.com/product/professional-photo-editing-service/
https://sleeklens.com/product-category/photoshop-actions/
btw please feel free to download my high res crib sheets if you think them helpful
