Kubota Artistic Tools Vol 3

The High Fashion-Edgy Pak

Kubota Artistic Tools Volume 3 - Those nice folks at Kubota Image Tools have released their third set in the Photoshop action series.

Once again you are given more than 50 creative actions. Effects that easily slip into your actions palette in Photoshop ready to use straight away. Please note that 16 of these actions will only work with Adobe Photoshop CS5 or higher.

This is a complete new set of artistic and highly useful actions. Once again I have quickly found one action that stands out and is invaluable to my workflow for my wedding and portrait photography. Skin Powder Genie.

Many of the actions included are adjustable in that they create a layer during the processing. This means you can then tweak to suit your image to your hearts' content. Ultimately, this adds a huge arsenal of creativity to your workflow that is easy to implement and use.

So why use Photoshop Actions?

I think it is fair to say that most professional portrait, landscape and wedding photographers apply a little "help" to their images. Maybe not so much for the commercial studio photographer. They have the time and equipment to play more with the lighting and clients normally request clean images for their products.

The way digital photography is going, anyone can now "fall over" a great looking shot. The last time I was at a wedding, the amount of people that had a DSLR or advanced compact digital camera was amazing. They were reeling shots off like it was going out of fashion.

If you want your images to stand out from the growing photography crowd, you need to give your images punch! Especially if you intend to get paid for your work. Doing it yourself can be a pain. However, with the click of a button or three, you can have instantly great looking images using Photoshop Actions that really compliment your own look and style.

Can't you just make your own?

You can but it isn't as easy as it looks and why bother? The way I see it, my time is valuable in itself. If I were to spend even just one hour creating an action that might just be ok, that is an hour lost of my time. In peak wedding photography season that equates to about €200+ and it isn't as easy as you might think!

I could create 50 "so-so" actions in a week or two but that is a week or more of my time gone.

For $9 for each action or less than $80 per pack of 50 or so actions, it is a no brainer. I now have another full set of more than 50 tried and tested actions that can be used and applied to just about any style or form of photography. Not just tried and tested but made by a professional photographer. One who understands Photoshop and the creative process more than most of us.

Many of these Photoshop Actions are in built in layers too. This means they are fully "tweak-able"…that is something I really haven't got time to learn! This first sample image is an unprocessed image. You can see on the right, a new image that was created using Deep Forest, Bronzed God 3 and Over X Helper (paint in) which assists over exposed images.

Click for larger images. © All images strictly copyright to Nick Stubbs