10 free Photoshop Actions

This article contains ten Photoshop Actions you can download for free. Actions are basically recorded sequences of commands that have been saved, and can be used at a later stage.

To install actions, you drag the .atn file into the actions folder directory in Photoshop, or you can alternatively drag the .atn into the actions panel with the PS interface.

Polaroid GENERATOR V1




Action no.4-spooky portraits




Eye colour




Convert white to transparent




Vintage Photo




Photoshop Dream Blur Action




SkinTone set




Gum Bichromate Print




Skin Smoothing




Comics Photoshop action

Free Photoshop brushes

This article contains a list of places where you can get free brushes for Photoshop. There are many different kinds of brushes available to download which range from grunge brushes to garden plate brushes, and many more.

To install brushes, you simply place the ‘.abr’ file into the brushes directory in Photoshop. The default location for a window computer is: C:\Program Files\Adobe\ (Your PS version) \Presets\Brushes.

Below I have provided a collection of 6 different Photoshop brush websites.


Brusheezy – The tag line is “stupid name, cool brushes”. There are many different categories of brushes to choose from.


Psbrushes – “The number one source for Photoshop brushes”. All the brushes are organized into categories with brushes being updated daily.


Deviantart – Many unique brushes submitted by the devianart community.


Qbrushes – The ‘Q’ stands for quality.


Brushking – Contains lost of different kinds of brushes.


Blendfu – Creative Photoshop brushes.


Feel free to leave any comments if you know any more free Photoshop brush websites.

Free image hosting

Image hosting is essentially a service which allows you to upload images on the internet website. The hosting is useful for variety of reasons such as sharing on blogs, email, Ebay and on forums. Since, the hosted images are on the internet they can be accessed anywhere in the world and on any computer. This can be very useful when you need access to your images on someone else computer.

However, a drawback of using free image hosting is the longevity of the websites. These websites occasionally vanish, due to financial reasons. This means all your hosted images will vanish along with the website. Another drawback of free image hosting is the amount adverts on the website, but this is expected as the websites need to generate revenue for providing a free service.

There are many different places on the internet that offer free image hosting. I have listed some of the free image hosting site below:

1. Photobucket

Photobucket offers image hosting, free photo sharing and video sharing.

2. Flicker

Flickr is almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world.

3. Tinypic

Tinypic is a photo and video sharing service that allows you to easily upload, link and share your images and videos

4. Pict

Free image hosting, picture hosting and photo sharing at Pict. Upload multiple images, resize photos, create albums, share your photos and much more.

5. Pictiger

Free image and flash hosting with various resizing, cropping, filtering and layout options. 1MB file size limit, no transfer limit specified.

6. Imageshack

ImageShack uses a highly reliable dedicated Linux server network to provide its digital content hosting service.

Free fonts

Fonts or typography is the appearance of single character which is categorised by the weight, design, size, metrics and proportions. The appearance of a font is important when you are designing for graphic and the web. In your computer there are only a limited number of fonts available for you to choose from. Sometimes you may wish to use a completely different style or design of font from the ones you already have.

Here is a small list free font’s available on the internet either for Windows or Mac.


1. Dafont

Dafonts is probably the largest website for free fonts. The fonts are organised in the following categories: themes, font authors and new fonts. You are also submit your own fonts as well.


2. Neatfonts

Neatfonts lets you to select the fonts on the right hand size of the homepage, which gets displayed in the central of the page. This site uses a navigation bar at the top of the page that shows the alphabetical letters of the font. By selecting a letter on the navigation bar, the corresponding fonts are displayed in a list on the right side of the page.


3. 1001freefonts

1001freefonts contains many different categories of fonts. The fonts are organised alphabetically and in different categories such as graffiti, horror and rounded.


4. urbanfonts

Urbanfonts has a similar layout to 1001freefont as it is also organised alphabetically and in different categories. However, urbanfonts have more font categories to choose from. There is also a ratings and comments feature in the display of each font. This allows you to see what other users have rated and commented for each fonts.


5. Fontface

Fontface contains more than 1000 fonts which are updated everyday. The fonts are categorised alphabetically. The only drawback of this site is the size of the download button. It is tiny compared to the sizes in the other site. Also the layout of the site could do with some work.


6. Abstractfonts

Abstractfonts is organised in categories, designers and in alphabetical order. There is also a language category which gives fonts in different categories. You can also vote and bookmark a font for when you later return to the website.

Freebies

In this freebies page you will find a collection of Photoshop resources which are available to download for free. Remember to subscribe to be updated with freebies.

Photoshop alternatives - Photoshop cost quite a lot of money to buy, so here is a list of free open source Photoshop alternatives.

Online Photo Editors - Why not try free online Photo editors instead of software editors. Online editors can provided a quick and easy way to edit Photos without having to buy or download any software.

Free fonts - If you ever get bored of the default fonts on your computer, then you can checkout this list of free fonts. There are literally thousands of different fonts to choose from. All the fonts in this list are suitable for the mac and windows.

Free image hosting - This is a list of free image hosting websites on the internet. The major benefit of hosting your images online is that they can be accessed on any computer with an internet connection.

Free Photoshop brushes - This is a collection of free Photoshop brushes.

10 Free Photoshop actions - This is a selection of 10 free PS actions.

Online photo editors

Instead of downloading a photo editor why not try these free online photo editors. The major benefits of free online photo editors are:

Flexibility - can be used on any computer with an internet connection. And can be accessed anywhere in the world.
Simplicity - online photo editor are designed to be simple to use. They have an intuitive interface which means that it does not have to be learned to be able to use it.
Powerful – most online editor can provide more than just the basic photo editing.
Share - Can be used in conjunction with other online services such as blogger, facebook, flickr, splashup, wordpress and many more.

I have provided a list of some online services which provide more than just simple resizing, cropping and rotation.


FotoFlexer

FotoFlexer is the world's most advanced online digital photo editor. It performs advanced effects previously only available to professionals using expensive software. Fotoflexer has a very simple and easy to use interface and is 100 % free.

Features include:

• Effects
• Fonts
• Distortion
• Retouch
• Shape
• Layer
• Doodling
• Advanced

Picnic

Make your photos fabulous with picnics powerful editing tools.

Features include:

• Fix your photos in just one click
• Use advanced controls to fine-tune your result
• Crop, resize, and rotate in real-time
• Tons of special effects, from artsy to fun
• Astoundingly fast, right in your browser
• Awesome fonts and top-quality type tool
• Basketfuls of shapes from hand-picked designers
• Works on Mac, Windows, and Linux
• No download required, nothing to install

Splashup

Splashup formerly Fauxto, is a powerful editing tool and photo manager. With all the features professionals use and novices want, it's easy to use, works in real-time and allows you to edit many images at once.

Features include:

• Photo sharing services.
• Multiple images.
• Layers and blend modes
• Layer effects
• Brushes
• Text editing
• Webcam

Other services

• Photoshop express - online version of Photoshop, still in beta.
• Sumopaint - Powerful and simply interface, still in beta
• Picture2life - edit, animate and collage images.
• Snipshot - edit pictures online.
• phixr - don't use your fingers, use tools.

Photoshop alternatives

Photoshop is a popular graphics editing program used by many professionals, and is regarded as the industry standard tool for image and graphic editing. This makes Photoshop very costly. I have provided a list of free open source alternative to Photoshop.

Picasa

This is basic image editing tool provided by Google.

The features include:

• Locate and organise all the photos on your computer.
• Edit and add effects to your photos with a few simple clicks.
• Share your photos with others through email, prints and on the web : it’s fast, easy and free.

Paint.NET

This is an open source bitmap drawing and editing application.

The feature include:

• An intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers.
• Unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools.
• An active and growing online community provides friendly help, tutorials and plugins.

CinePaint 0.22

CinePaint is a deep paint image retouching tool that supports higher color fidelity than ordinary painting tools

The features include:

• used to retouch feature films and in pro photography.
• CinePaint opens high fidelity image file formats such as DPX, 16-bit TIFF, and OpenEXR, and conventional formats like JPEG and PNG
• It supports 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit color channels, HDR and CMS.
• Gallery-quality printing. B&W photographs have only one color channel and degrade quickly when manipulated as 8-bit images. CinePaint has higher fidelity and offers a 16-bit printing path to the print-head using GutenPrint.
• Innovation. CinePaint offers features that go beyond ordinary painting tools.

Krita 1.6.1

Krita is a painting and image editing application for KOffice.

The features include:

• 16-bit image support, High dynamic resolution images.
• Krita supports many managed colorspaces, like rgb, grayscale, cmyk, lab, ycbcr and lms, in 8 and 16 bits per channel.
• Krita can import RAW images in 8 and 16 bits per channel and load and save the usual image formats: tiff, png, jpeg.
• Krita has a large array of tools
• Krita has image layers, group layers, adjustment layers and the innovative part layers
• Krita is scriptable in Python and Ruby and offers a small, but useful DCOP interface. Krita 2.0 will also be dbus-enabled.
• There is a rich set of filters for image enhancement, color enhancement and artistic reinterpretation of your image.

Gimp 2.4

Probably the oldest and most well-known open source graphic application - GNU Image Manipulation Program or Gimp was started in 1995 and has since then grown to the status it has today.

The features include:

• Customizable Interface - allowing you to change colors, widget spacings and icon sizes to custom tool sets in the toolbox.
• Photo Enhancement - imperfections can be easily compensated for using GIMP
• Digital Retouching - ideal for advanced photo retouching techniques
• Hardware Support - includes a very unique support for various input devices out of the box
• File Formats - The file format support ranges from the common likes of JPEG (JFIF), GIF, PNG, TIFF to special use formats such as the multi-resolution and multi-color-depth.

Gimpshop 2.2.11

GIMPshop is a modification of the free/open source GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP), intended to replicate the feel of Adobe Photoshop. Its primary purpose is to make users of Photoshop feel comfortable using GIMP.

The features include:

• It shares all GIMP's advantages, including the long feature list and customisability, while addressing some common criticisms regarding the program's interface
• Supports all GIMP's own plugins, filters, brushes, etc. remain available.
• many Photoshop tutorials can be followed in GIMPshop unchanged, and most others can be adapted for GIMPshop users with minimal effort.