My good friend Randy Kepple, who is a Portland OR, wedding photographer,  has made his favourite actions available as an action set.  The image above was processed with the Sold My Soul Blues action.  Now as much as actions can be a sweet short-cut to get a specific look with our images, it is often better (and more fun) to get your hands dirty and start mix-n-matching them and playing around with them to extend the look you get with an action, into something more specific to your own idea of what you wanted to achieve.  Randy’s action set can be purchased via Fundy’s site where there is a special deal on at the moment.  Check it out. 

Now, as a special little bonus (unrelated to the action set mentioned above), for anyone who has read this far:

There is a new Photoshop extension called the Watermark Creator which works for CS4 (only).  This extension will take your logo file (PSD, JPG, TIFF, PNG. AI) and place it on your high resolution file. It even supports layer blending modes, so you can take your logo on a white background, change the layer blending mode to multiply to drop out the white. You can choose where to place the logo on the image and adjust the size and opacity of your logo.

Once you have it all set up, you can choose to save the file as a high resolution version (4×6 proof prints, for example) or web resolution size. It will even create a live preview that you can review and change settings until you are happy to run with it. If you save for web, anything smaller than 1,000 pixels is automatically sharpened so you can do it all in one step. No need to watermark your files and then reopen them to sharpen.

You can download the zip file for Watermark Creator from here - right-click and save-as.   I recommend that you watch this video if you have any questions about installation or if you want to see what it does and how it works.