Totally Rad Actions "Bullet Tooth" from "The Revenge" set
Today, I’d like to introduce you to the newest addition to my workflow: Totally Rad Actions.
Style: The Totally Rad actions, textures and presets are extreme, bold and juicy.
What: Totally Rad makes Textures, Lightroom Presets and Photoshop Actions. The textures are ultra grungy and dirty. The presets are sensible yet funky and the actions are extreme and utterly fabulous.
How: To use the actions, you must have Photoshop 2 or higher. Which means that these actions don’t work with PSE (boo hoo). The Lightroom presets work if you have LR (obviously!) and the textures aren’t just image layers you have to figure out yourself. They are a little plug-in program that runs through PS3 or higher and it takes all the guess work out of working with textures. The sets work with any photo, but it’s highly recommended that you use them on RAW files. They can be used on jpg, but they work much much better on RAW.
{General Perks}
- All of the Totally Rad products play well together so they can be layered (or in my case, piled) on top of one another for an immeasurable amount of looks and effects.
- The Totally Rad website is absolutely full of information for your editing pleasure. Recipes to cook your shots, before & afters for B&A junkies like me, video tutorials and a blog to follow once you’ve fallen in love. And they even have some freebie sets to reel you in!
{Preset Perks}
Courtesy of my lovely friend and photographer extraordinaire: Shipra Panosian. Look her up. She will rock your world.
The TR presets are made to work together and come with three sets: “RAD Basics”, “RAD Effects” and “RAD Vignettes & Toning”. You can just go down the line applying and tweaking presets to come up with something totally original. Like all the TR products, the presets have irreverent names like “Bitchin Camaro”, “Boogie Nights” and “Skid Row”. And it always makes me giggle that the vignettes are named after the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. My favourite thing about these presets is that each one comes with a light, medium and heavy version.
{Action Perks}
These aren’t your grandma’s actions (does anyone’s grandma even use PS?) The TR actions are bold and extreme. Some might say they’re not your everyday china, but I’m a use-the-good-china-every-day type of girl so these do me just fine every single day! I probably use them at some point on every shoot I do these days.
Visit the Totally Rad website to see tons of B&As. They also have a great thing where you choose a photo and apply different presets or actions to the photo to see what they all do. Kind of like getting to try them all for free before you buy. If you want to see some really high quality and entertaining vid tutorials to show you these actions in action, go here and click ‘tutorials’.
{Perky Textures}
It’s really kinda hard to describe how amazing Totally Rad’s textures are. Obviously, coming from Totally Rad, the textures themselves totally rock, but their unique way of helping you apply your textures beats all in my book. When you buy the ‘Dirty Pictures’ textures, what you get is a download which effortlessly installs itself into your Photoshop filters menu. The next time you go into PS, you’ll see it there at the bottom:
When you click it, you’ll get a little plugin pop up which guides you through the whole texture applying process. You don’t have to resize the layers or fiddle with them to figure out what looks good. It places the texture over the image perfectly and lets you experiment with different blending modes straight from the Totally Rad plug-in. It looks like this:
It will even show you a preview of your selected image with all the different textures applied before you commit! That part looks like this:
The textures set is by far the most ingenious thing I think Totally Rad has come up with. I have yet to find out how to add my other textures to the library to use with the Dirty Pictures program but if I figure it out, I’ll letchya know.
So go on and check out Totally Rad. I double-dog-dare-you!
