This time, I’m going to show a few examples of how to use the 8 different Channels actions in Handy Actions 3. They’re all conveniently clustered together in the palette, under the Channels category. You’ll find actions for editing one of the three color channels (Red, Green and Blue), and few swap channels actions, plus a return to RGB editing and the popular Channels Mixer for creating Black & White images. It’s hopefully pretty obvious that channel editing is a pretty powerful way to correct some colors and get your photos looking their best with very little effort.

Let’s start with the three color channels actions Blue Channel, Green Channel and Red Channel (plus the RGB Channel action to return to “normal”). I’ll be using the sample image to the right for these examples. First, you should know that most images that come from your digital camera or scanner are RGB images - images comprised of three color channels: Reds, Greens & Blues. (hence, RGB). These three channels can be manipulated individually for great control over the look of the final image.

The Thumbnail up there shows the regular RGB image; the three images down the left side here show the individual channels that combine to create it - The Red channel on top, followed by the Green & Blue channels.  You can see that most of the noise present in the image comes from the Blue channel  (with less in the Green channel),

which makes it very easy to remove most of it. Simply run the Blue Channel action to isolate it and run one of the blur filters just enough to remove most of the noise.

I used the Noise>Reduce Noise filter on just the Blue channel, setting the Strength to 10 and the Preserve Details and Reduce Color Noise to 0, with Remove JPG Artifact ticked on. This took out quite a bit of the noise, but there was still a little too much in the Green channel, so I ran the same filter on that, reducing the Strength to 7.

The Red channel seemed just about right, but I wanted to boost the color in her lips and cheeks, so I painted just a bit with the Dodge tool, with Midtones selected in the options bar. This really brought out some nice red tones. 

A few more tweaks with cloning and spot blurring individual channels gave a very nice result. As a final touch, I ran the Photo-Polarize action.

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Now for some fun (although these actions can be used in a non-gimmicky / effecty kind of way). I ran the three swap channels actions for some interesting effects:

 


 

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Finally, I duplicated the image (using the Duplicate Image action) and flattened it. I wanted to experiment with the Channel Mixer action (which only works in Elements 5 - sorry, PSE 4 users).

I ticked on Monochromatic at the bottom of the dialog (to get a grayscale output) and played around a bit with mixing the channels to get a nice B&W image. I liked this setting so much, I clicked the Save button saved it so I can load it up the next time I want to use it - this is an awesome feature! I don’t have to recreate the same setting every time I want to adjust an image with about the same tonal range.

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