Photoshop Actions

Photoshop actions for print, film and poster effects

A Photoshop action is a recorded sequence of steps saved as an .atn file. You load it once, open a photo, press play, and Photoshop repeats every filter, mask and adjustment of the effect in the same order, on any image.

Most of our actions imitate a physical process: a newspaper halftone screen, a tired office copier, a risograph drum running two inks slightly out of register. They are built to leave a layered result, so the effect is a starting point you can push or pull back.

The real win shows up on the second image. Doing a halftone by hand means converting the photo to grayscale, then to bitmap, picking a screen frequency and angle, and cleaning up the mess afterwards. Doing it once is fine, but once you have to repeat it for twelve posters in a series, or for a client's whole product line, the corner-cutting begins. An action does not cut corners, hopefully: the twelfth image gets exactly the treatment the first one got.

What the actions in this collection recreate

The quickest way to pick one is to ask where the image is supposed to have come from. A gig poster, a 1950s magazine and a VHS still each leave different marks, and each action should be tuned to one of those sources.

• Halftone and newsprint: dot screens borrowed from photo-mechanical printing, the process newspapers used to reproduce photographs with ink dots of varying size.
• Photocopy and threshold: hard black-and-white contrast, toner noise and dirty edges, the look of flyers and zines made on office copiers.
• Risograph and screen print: grain, limited ink colors and slight misregistration, after the stencil duplicators that independent publishers adopted for cheap color runs.
• Pop art and retro catalog: flat color fields and bold dots in the spirit of mid-century comics and mail-order catalogs.
• Film, matte and vintage grain: faded color, lifted blacks and grain for a photo that looks shot on film.
• Glitch, anaglyph and HUD: channel splits, scan lines and hologram overlays for tech, music and gaming artwork.

Where print and film effects make sense

These looks carry a lot of meaning, so they work best when the meaning fits. A photocopy texture says DIY and underground; a risograph grain says small press and independent; clean halftone dots say vintage newspaper or comic book. Use them where that story belongs to the project.

• Gig posters, flyers and zines, where the copier and riso look is native rather than borrowed.
• Album and single covers, especially for genres with a strong print culture behind them.
• Editorial illustration, where a halftone portrait can sit next to text without fighting it.
• Merch and apparel graphics, since threshold and halftone results translate well to screen printing with one or two inks.
• Social campaigns, where one action applied to every photo gives a series a recognizable look without a shoot.

Getting a clean result

Actions are recorded at a particular image size, and the grain, dot size and blur radius are measured in pixels. The same settings that look right on a large photo turn coarse on a small one, because the action does not rescale them. If the product description or the included guide names a working size, resize your photo to it before you press play; if not, start with an image about as large as the preview. A few more things save time:

• Run the action on a flattened copy of your photo and keep the original underneath.
• Use the English-language interface if an action stops with an error. Some actions call layers and menu items by name, and a localized Photoshop names them differently.
• Check the Photoshop version on the product page. Older actions may rely on filters that newer versions moved or renamed.