With all the Lensbaby fun of late, I went in search of ways to enhance the Lensbaby experience and stumbled across the Kubota Lensbaby Action Pak! For those not familiar with Kubota actions, they’re purchasable groups of photoshop actions (very popular with studio, event and wedding shooters) which provide you with quick, easy and repeatable adjustments with the click of a button. Based in Bend, Oregon, they’re just down the way from me so I decided to get in touch with them and they were very gracious to let me play around with their Lensbaby Action Pak which includes 15 actions tuned for image files taken with various Lensbaby optics. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, and while I never have a problem rambling on and on, I will let the image examples show off what these actions do. Starting with the original image taken with a GF1 and the Lensbaby TT + Composer / double glass optic and on through each of the included 15 Kubota Filters:
Tag Archives: actions
*Adding an ‘aged’ feel to your photographs.
One thing I find funny about modern digital photography, is how much we tend to revert back to wanting it to look like film. The irony of using a $600+ software program, thousands of dollars in camera gear and a bit of time in front of a computer to get an image to look like it was taken with an older film camera and some expired film is not lost on me. But, if we’ve already got the tools, why not have the ability to use them for a variety of effects right? I love vintage, or aged processing, so here are a couple techniques I have played around with to get my high resolution images to look like they were taken a while back…
*Presets! Less talk, more rock! Or, one easy way to streamline your workflow.

Presets, a key to streamlining your workflow. (*using a New York Times Mag Aperture3 preset by Zurli) - image ©tyson robichaud photography2010
Alright alright now. No matter what your stance is on post processing, love it, hate it, meh, one thing that is hard to deny is that for the average photographer, digital photography requires a bit more time than shooting film on an image by image basis. Yes, our feedback with digital is instantaneous, yes we are able to immediately adjust on the fly but one thing that has crept into the equation is the amount of time needed after shooting to upload, catalog, tag, process and archive all of your images (not to mention, many of us tend to take quite a few more images per outing now that we get more than 24 exposures a round). One helpful tool is the use of presets, or actions. These are a series of repeatable adjustments and instructions applied to your digital file so that you don’t have to manually adjust each and every one individually. Read on for links, examples and tons of freebies for APERTURE, LIGHTROOM and PHOTOSHOP presets and actions…