— Being able to quickly turn out consistently awesome creative results is one of the cornerstones of making your art lucrative. Which is one of the reasons I love professionally crafted Photoshop Actions.

And in this regard, the new Artistry4 set put out by Dave Seeram is making my head spin with all the possibilities it opens up.

You’ve just gotta see this stuff. After you finish reading this post, take a minute to look over all sorts of awesome examples by clicking here . . .

The beauty of a great Photoshop Action is that with a single click you can have Photoshop spin out hundreds of individual steps (applying custom brushes, sampling colors, wielding custom patterns, creating paths, generating masks, all sorts of stuff) — and then deliver up a work of pure wizardry when it’s finished.

Then to make it even cooler, you can go in and customize all sorts of things in the wonderfully tidy layer stack it generates for you.

And the value in the SPEED this brings to the process of creating a series of related compositions can’t be overstated.

Look at the image I’m including here. That took hundreds of steps in Photoshop to produce. Would’ve normally taken me several hours to create this kind of effect — even assuming I could figure out how.

But how long did this one take?

Well, here was my complete process:

1.) Installed the Photoshop Actions and the custom Brushes and Patterns that come with them — 30 seconds.

2.) Opened the photo, checked its size, made a quick crop — 30 seconds.

3.) Clicked “Play” on the first step of the Action, which then prompted me to paint over the main subject of the image — 30 seconds.

4.) Clicked “Play” on the second step of the Action, and then let it work its magic — two minutes fifteen seconds of watching it play out in wonder (according to the stopwatch on my iPhone).

5.) Marveled at the end results — 15 more seconds.

6.) Opened up the folders in the layer stack, toggling each on and off just to see how the piece is arranged … then identified the three layers I wanted to adjust the opacity of and add my own layer masks to (mainly to tidy up a few places where the paint splatters obscured the face) — another minute.

7.) Saved the layered PSD file, then saved a JPG — 30 seconds.

Combined time invested?

Five and a half minutes.

Start to finish.

And THAT is the magic of a professionally designed Photoshop Action.

(And keep in mind, this was just one of five brand new amazingly creative effects included in this set. Let me toss in two more I made using different effects — each also knocked out in about 5 minutes.)

And you know what’s really cool? These are just the sorts of Actions that can make you immediately successful in commercial photo artistry. I mean, check out some of the effects in this set, and imagine offering to create artistic photos or company portraits for a cool local business you like.

Or product photos (like these I made here) for your favorite local coffee shop.

Or cool creative images for a local band, sports team, or dance group.

I guarantee you can find someone more than happy to pay you double, triple, even quadruple what this entire set costs.

Just don’t let on how quickly you were able to create them! (They don’t need to know that part. LOL.) You’ll finish the entire project in next to no time, but go and let them think it was difficult, and don’t share the completed images with them for a day or two.

Because creating amazing artwork this elaborate really isn’t supposed to be this easy!

– Sebastian

An Easy Way to Have More Fun with Photoshop Actions, Generate Even More Excitement, and Very Quickly Turn a Nice Profit From Your Art:

Here’s a tip if you do decide you want to make a little money with these Photoshop Actions. For your first “gig,” just grab a couple of quick photos when you’re visiting a favorite local restaurant or business (as I did here) and then without saying anything about it go home and create the artwork.

Now wait a couple of days … Then, when you do go back in, share the images — but on your laptop or on an iPad (not on your phone!).

Then, once you have them ooohing and aaahing over what you created, just say casually, “I’m a digital artist. Would you want the rights to these high-res images files? For your website, social media, ads, whatever? No money — just how about we trade? Maybe ____?” and fill in the blank with something reasonable. If it’s a hip local coffee shop, for instance, say “in trade for my next ten drinks.”

That makes it really easy for them to say “Sure!” and it makes it super easy for you too since you’re not asking for actual money. (And since ten drinks works out to at least fifty bucks, you’ve already pretty much paid for the complete set of Actions!)

After you do this once or twice, then when you do actually ask someone for pay it won’t seem difficult or awkward anymore. Mostly because by then you know how valuable and appreciated the images are to them.

And the beauty is: You were able to create all of it in a matter of minutes. (Even if you go on to layer in some text for them or crop-and-size different versions for whatever they need.) So you’re risking nothing! And it really is that easy.

One More Thing: Remember that if you do make use of Photoshop Actions like these, go in and tinker with the layers (tweaking opacities, adding your own adjustment layers and layer masks), and definitely see what you can do to creatively blend variations of the finished results with blend modes and layer masks.

That really opens up the range of potential results and makes these even more valuable to you.

And of course you can also edit the images in other ways, as I did with the version featured at the top of this post. After that Action ran, I cut out the hand holding the beverage, moved it to its own layer, enlarged it with Free Transform, and moved it up so that it would be positioned more dramatically. It’s so much fun working with this stuff!

Postscript: Portraits

Also worth mentioning here — never underestimate the value an artistic treatment can bring to your portraits. Especially if you’re creating portraits of singers, dancers, bands.

Look at these amazing artistic portraits by French AWAKE artist Anna Czekala. However you approach creating your work, these kinds of stylized images are of enormous value to any performer.

And being able to produce a series of such images, rendered in much the same style (though with each customized and made unique), is another of the those things that can make pro Photoshop actions so incredibly helpful to you.

If you’re interested in grabbing the newest set of creative actions from PhotographyBB, you only have a couple days left to add Artistry4 to your arsenal while it’s still on sale during its launch. Definitely get it before Thursday night rolls around.
You can check it all out by clicking here …