Most of the time when processing my photos I’ll tweak and fiddle around with various settings, filters and effects. I also have a few actions for sharpening and applying vignette that a friend gave me. But I wanted to experiment with developing my own effect, to develop my own unique feel to my photos that some photographers have in their processing.
I don’t want all my photos to look heavily cross-processed or desaturated in a way that makes all my photo look uniformly bleak, cold or alien. I think the latest action I recorded today is over the top but I like it. I created it using Channel Mixer in CMYK mode to shuffle around the channel source ratios for the output channels (which I think works better in CMYK than RGB), plus Curves in RGB mode to alter the contrast in each channel.
I’ve also created a grain action that I’ve used in this pics of my friend Rachel Greaves that reduces a copy of the image to 20%, applies grain, then sizes it back up and superimposes it at 70% over the original:
These ones have a variation on the grain effect that applies it only to midtones, keeping the whites and blacks relatively clean by making a new channel and applying Curves to drop the highlights down to black and bring up the midtones to white then making it a selection for the noise filter.
This photo has natural grain from high ISO:
