I love actions, I love making actions and I’d be a liar if I said I didn’t love using them (most of which I have specially created for me). 

A couple of my favorite homegrown actions are a Silver Luminosity action and a highlights sparing Not Quite Black Not Quite White action I recently revised to add a tad more contrast to.  These actions require a properly exposed image – most actions do.  Why I love the Silver Luminosity action – it gives images both a kick of contrast and bit of glowy skin detail.  I really love the NQBNQW black and white action because it focuses on the midtones (it works best on an image that has been adjusted already). 

Try ‘em out.  Let me know what you think!  Enjoy & use responsibly.

NOTHING else has been done to these images above.  My usual edits that typically produce this for my clients, ah the secrets of that process will be exposed at the May & June workshops:

DOWNLOAD AREA for the STL Marmalade Photography LTD action set.

Disclaimer: because this is a free action I cannot provide support for installation issues or issues of incompatibility with your editing software.  This small action set should work very well with Photoshop CS2, CS3 and likely CS4 (not tested on CS4).

**edited to add:  I’ve been told by several testers that yes indeed these two actions work well in CS4**