[DannyRaphael]

In another post at www.DPReview.com I happened upon another exceptional set of actions, developed by Mike Finn. Among them is one named "Oil Painting," which I found to be especially innovative.

In a key technique I'd not seen before Mike duplicates the green channel, copies it to a new layer in the layer palette and sets the blend mode to luminosity. He goes on to apply a variety of “arty filters” to this “copy of the green channel” layer.

The results are very impressive: Great artistic textures that coincide with image characteristics without hosing up the colors like some of the arty filters are prone to do when applied directly to a layer.

Mike’s process is an improvement over a method I described prevously in which one duplicates the subject layer, applies arty filter(s) of choice, runs the emboss filter and sets the blend of the embossed layer to overlay.

How to download
With Mike’s permission here’s a link to his site, where the current set of actions can be downloaded.

I'm including the current collection as an attachment in this post in case the link above is ever changed or removed.

Caution: If you browse Mike’s lovely gallery be forewarned there are a few tastefully done images that are a little too racy for this site, i.e., they show female nudity.

I hope you have as much fun with these actions as I'm having.

~Danny~