I've been playing around with some actions recently. I'm not sure how I feel about them yet, but I can't deny that created some neat effects and certainly made editing easier!

Here are the main actioned photos, as well as what the action did (some of them are quite obvious!) Below is a sampling of some images from two separate weddings.

This was just a basic action that consisted of a color pop and some sharpening --I'm really satisfied with how this looks on flowers.

This is a lovely image of a bride hugging her mother -- the action here just made a black and white conversion and gave a mocha-tint to the picture for some interest. It's quick, but has to be in moderation because it's easy to do this to a lot of photos.

This was a "sunlight" effect with sharpening on the final image. This action is a really nice action because it is quick and can be batch-edited to a lot of pictures and makes general improvements very nicely.

This action was called "Whiter whites and Super Saturation" I like the effect on things like wedding photos of decorations. Looks bad on people. This action was another black and white conversion with a slightly different tint than the bride hugging her mother. I like the effect on detail shots. Again, have to be careful not to overuse. 

This action gave an overall "vintagey" feel as well as the feel of a film-effect. I wasn't sure how I liked this picture, because it started to feel "Instagram" but I think it's grown on me -- use sparingly.

A common trend -- actions work best on detail shots. This was a "no questions asked" B&W conversion action with no tint to it. I think that the straight black and white tones work best on this picture, and a brown or orange tint ruined the final effect. 

This was a vivid color pop +sharpening action. Looking back, the sharpening is too much and I'll have to rewrite the action for a little less strong on that part, but overall it does a nice job.

Overall, I'm still hung up on what I think of actions as a whole. I sometimes miss having the complete control over what I'm doing, but there's no denying how much time it saves. Hm! :-)