50 Free Photoshop actions for amazing photo effects

Photoshop actions can be a tremendous time-saver for those folks who usually follow a specific style or a few in their photo editing workflow. Instead of doing the same number of steps over and over again every time you wanna post process a photo, you can just do all of that within a few seconds with the click of one button.

But Photoshop actions are not only good in that area. These actions have hugely expanded lately as a great way for photographers and designers alike, to share their favorite photo effects with the world. Some even create sets of actions and offer them to their visitors for a price.

Of course, in this open-source community, not everything has to come with a price, as there are millions and millions of talented and creative designers and photographers that create wonderful actions and offer them to everyone for free. Of those, I’ve made a collection of some 50 Free Photoshop actions that will help you achieve amazing photo effects on your own images.

Before we get to the list, I just wanna talk about how you can install and run Photoshops actions on your photos, for the sake of our friends out there that haven’t really used them before.

How to install and run a Photoshop action

1. Decide on a Photoshop action that you wish to try out, find the download link for the file, and store it onto your machine.
2. Either:
   1. Double click the atn file that was saved on your computer (sometimes you’ll get a zip file. Extract the contents and you’ll find your atn file there).

      Or

   2. start Adobe Photoshop, locate the Actions panel at the right sidebar of your window. Hit the downward arrow at the top, rightmost corner. Scroll down to “load actions” and browse for the atn file you’ve downloaded and select it to load.
3. Open up the image you wish to run your Photoshop action on.
4. At the ACTIONS panel, locate your loaded action (there might be extra, default actions that come with the Adobe Photoshop installation).
5. Select the action and hit that little play button (►) at the bottom of the panel (third icon from the left).
6. Sit back and watch things take their course =). Once done, you’ll have a brand new photo with a brand new effect.

I just wanna point out that not all actions work perfectly on all images. Some actions work better with specific contrast or brightness values, so don’t be disappointed if your photo doesn’t turn out like the one you saw in the preview image. For best results, try to pick a photo that roughly looks like the original example photo (the before photo) on the actions page.

50 Free Photoshop actions for amazing photo effects

If you have any Photoshop actions that you’d like to share with us, or if you have tried any of the ones listed above leave us links in the comments below so we can check’em out!