Add some Magic to your Photos with Photoshop Actions

I’ve been pushing through a creative rut lately and I’ve been experimenting with new things to get inspired and push myself out of my comfort zone a bit. Today I decided to try photographing a pair of Sony headphones I got recently by cashing in the rewards points on my credit card. Here’s a short video that shows the studio setup and the post processing:

After importing the images into photoshop and adjusting the camera raw setting to slightly increase sharpness, contrast, and exposure, I used the spot healing tool to remove the thread that was suspending the headphones in front of the backdrop.

Adding the Sandstorm effect was simple. You can get the action here. I merged all layers and made the single layer the background layer by selecting Layer > New > Layer from Background. The next step is to create a new layer above this background layer and name it “brush.”

Next, I selected a brush (any color is fine) and brushed on on the parts of the image that I wanted to be effected by the Sandstorm action.

 

With the “brush” layer selected I ran the “UP” version of the photoshop action. Again, here is the final result:

 

On this image, I used the Dispersion Action on this photo to make it appear like the windmill was breaking apart.