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new pair of actions for your Add-O-Matic. These are just for fun - no real functionality, like earlier actions - just a colored bar background and a texture overlay.

The colored bar background action was found on a tutorial site awhile back - I honestly don’t recall which one, but there are a bunch similar to the image this action creates. It can also be used to create the Windows XP logo colors - woo hoo!

I used it to create a backdrop for a photo I took of the famous Iwa Jima statue in Arlington, VA last February, on an extremely cold, blustery & snowy day. I ran the action, and flattened the image so it’s all on a single layer (I actually used the “Merge to New Layer” action, from Handy Actions 3, so the entire image is on it’s own layer with the other layers left intact).

Then I made a silhouette of the statue with a variety of selection tools (hint: I used some of the Channels tools, also in Handy Actions 3, to help get things selected just right). I created a new layer from the selection (again, Handy Actions 3) and filled it with black. Then I dragged the colored bars background image over, resized it, and there you have it. If you wanted, you could use different colors for the 4 bars - maybe a green, brown, tan & red would work better with this particular image…  It’s also taken from a different angle than what you may be used to seeing, so I could also have flipped the image horizontally to get a more familiar view of it. Ah well, you only notice these things after it’s been finished….

The other action simply creates a grungy texture and overlays it on a duplicate of your image. I ran it on these tiki monkeys shot at Disney last summer and then added a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer, with Colorize checked, for this final image.

I also played around with several actions from B&W Lab 3 for this photo I took in San Francisco last summer - first I ran “Splash of Color - Blue” and adjusted the layers for a nice blend. I followed that with the “Polarize” action twice, then ran the “Soft Black & White” action. Finally, I added the texture overlay, which really gave an old time newspaper feel to it.

playaround with different combinations of effects in the Bundle Pack - several folks have asked about tutorials and videos about how to use them to create various effects, and there really isn’t a single or “recommended” way - just load ‘em up, and start clicking. Play around with the layers that most of them create for you - turn some layers on or off, change blending modes and opacities, swap the order - it’s really up to you, and the possibilities are quite literally infinite.  Post your images in our Photoshop Elements Techniques Flickr group, too - I’d love to see what you’ve created!

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