“Lightroom” Adjustment Actions for Photoshop

I have Lightroom, but I often find myself wanting to make small White Balance, Clarity, Fill Light, and other adjustments on pictures that I’m working on in Photoshop, and I think it’s kind of a pain to take those images back into Lightroom or ACR to tweak them in the middle of my PS processing, so ………..

I’ve developed a collection of basic color and tonal adjustment tools modeled after the basic adjustments in Adobe Lightroom. It was developed in Photoshop CS4, but there is a CS3 version (without the Vibrance action) available as well. I have been advised that all but Vibrance and Clarity work in earlier versions of Photoshop as well.

I have set up actions so that you can easily use to make slider-like adjustments as follows:

* White Balance (Color Temp and Tint) Action
* Exposure Action
* Highlight Recovery Action
* Fill Light Action
* Brightness Action
* Contrast Action
* Blacks (Shadows) Action
* Saturation Action
* Vibrance Action
* Clarity Action

You can play individual actions for each of the above adjustments or play all (“Darkroom – Full Set”) to create an entire set of “sliders.” Please note that the Clarity, Fill Light, and Highlight Recovery actions will only work well on high-res images of 6MB or greater.

After running an action, increase the opacity of the adjustment layers to implement your chosen correction(s). By default, all layers are set at 0% opacity, so you will not see any changes until you increase the opacity as desired.

Download this free action set for CS4 here (Mac users: Option + Click “Download”).

Download the CS3 version here.

Something not working well?  Have a better approach to one or more of these adjustments? Other questions or suggestions? Let me know in the comments!