Photoshop Actions Madness

This edition of Photoshop Madness focuses on actions and reflections … Photoshop reflections, FREE high-quality Photoshop PSD icons, Photoshop Actions for Amazing Color Enhancements, 50 essential photo actions, Photoshop clone tool actions and Quick straighten tutorial for Photoshop Madness

Photoshop Madness, Fred Showker surfs the web in search of good Photoshop stuff

PHOTOSHOP MADNESS for November PHOTOSHOP MADNESS is where you practically go mad trying to find the most useful stuff for Photoshop out there among a jungle of bush-leagers, Rube Goldbergers, site scalpers, and domain kiters!

In our Twitter escapades, we found dozens and dozens of tweeters tweeting about these 150 Photoshop Actions. WOW — what a treasure, we thought. However, after wasting about three hours sifting through the bungled mess, we came to the realization that 150 Photoshop Actions is seriously NOT what we wanted, and it would cost five times as much to sift through them as it would to actually do a few. Besides — how many times do you need 150 Photoshop Actions to process a file? Actions are for bulk or repetitive tasks. And if you use these for bulk photos, you’re going to have a pretty boring photo album. But that’s another story.

Be careful what you click -- beware of malware and phishing sites As always, we remind you, especially Windows users — be careful what you click. There are malware, phishing stalker and predator links abundant in many of the replicated sites these days. Whatch those little popups in the text. Just stay on the tutorial / content paths and you’ll be okay.
We did indeed find some links of note…


FREE high-quality Photoshop PSD icons for web 2.0

From the Photoshop and Illustrator pens of Boris P. comes a lot of free stuff for webmasters and designers.
High resolution backgrounds, textures, icons etc, and original Photoshop PSD sources. This series of seals is primarily for Web 2.0 users, but is actually quite nice for other uses as well.
Photoshop and Illustrator  PSD icons PSD file Download : psd-guarantee-seal.psd
Pic: Red & Blue seals, Guarantee, Wax Seal
Creator: www.psdgraphics.com


Photoshop Actions for Amazing Color Enhancements


100 Photoshop Actions for Amazing Color Enhancements

If you don’t have anything better to do, you can sift your way through 100 Photoshop Actions for enhancements — most of which you’ve seen before, or already know how to do the effect in just a few clicks in Photoshop. But webdesignledger.com thought it was important enough to tweet, so we pass them along to you! You can waste a lot of time here
Amazing Color Enhancements 100 Photoshop Actions, or just get this one which covers most of the others:


50 essential actions

These 50 essential Photoshop photo actions cover most everything you’d want to do to a photo – or lead you to your own permutations. Mauricio Estrella from Ecuador assembled this massive pack of FIFTY actions packed for Photoshop CS / CS2 / CS3 / CS4 —
actions gives you some awesome color / tone / contrast processing.
Sample Grid JPG
Promo Poster JPG
50 essential Photoshop photo actions Download it: 50_Photoshop_Postwork_Actions_by_manicho.atn
Visit Mauricio Deviantart page


Water Reflection in Photoshop

Water Reflection in Photoshop!

We thought this was a relatively elegant design tutorial for easy photoshop designs. This one a Photoshop tutorial to build reflections on water. We’ve seen at least a hundred versions of this exact tutorial, but this page is nearly spam free!
Author Barry Liam said… “Nobody seems to be leaving any comments!”
      Well, no wonder, Barry – your tutorial has been tweeted several hundred times by a dozen
“Photoshop” jerks who all want you to believe it’s theirs! So, here’ya go, folks, the
actual link to the original tutorial: Picture
Water Reflection in
Photoshop
Water Reflection in
Photoshop Tutorial


Photoshop clone tool used to create these reflections

Add realistic reflections using Clone Stamp

The above tutorial is basic. This one is a lot more complicated yet gives a much better results. Someone named Sergio has uploaded this rather elegant tutorial on using Clone Stamp tool to build reflections. Full picture
Add realistic reflection using Clone Stamp tool


using the crop tool to straighten a photo in Photoshop

Quick straighten in Photoshop

Tweets and retweets of this technique were all over Twitter — all giving the wrong address, but we drilled down and found the author — someone called Hpnotiqz — who writes:
      “share with you a Photoshop setting that hopefully will save you time and wasted energy. This is especially useful for those of us that aren?t using a tripod. It?s how to easily achieve a straight horizon in you photographs.”
… which you can read

here.

But seriously, folks — the quicker way is to use the Crop tool. Line up one of the edges with the straight element in the scene, rotate to match, then expand the other edges for the final crop.
See: Using the Crop Tool for some other slick cropping tricks.


Searching for good Photoshop images and tutorials amongst all the total madness out on the web Don’t let Photoshop Madness get you down!

There are always lots of spectacular Photoshop images and visuals out there! Share them! We’ll be back shortly with MORE Photoshop Madness … and please — BE CAREFUL WHERE YOU SURF … but when you do find a great Photoshop practitioner, or a good Photoshop tutorial, please share it with us! If you create Photoshop Tutorials yourself, please post your info here so you can be considered for a Photoshop Fave!

Of course, some of our favorite editions of Photoshop Madness can be found in the legacy Photoshop Tips & Tricks web site!
See the last edition of Photoshop Madness

Thanks for reading

Fred Showker

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