Boutwell’s Totally Rad
After being on a hiatus from using actions – to force myself to learn photoshop better – I am now using actions again – and I have to say that Boutwell’s Totally Rad action sets are fabulous – well designed, modularized, thought out, reliable – they are just simply well done. They are worth having.
I have many many other, and most of them – I don’t use. They were still worth buying (barely) as they provided a good learning experience, in particular giving insight on how photographers got certain effects.
What is the difference?
The most important is modularization; Totally Rad enables the independent use of effects of layers and/or group (sets) and effects within groups. For example, an effect called “Prettyizer” that I have tried for portraits, make color look more rich, increase contrast, boosts saturation and softens for a portrait glow kind of feel. Here Totally Rad creates a group so that you can easily adjust the cumulative effect and then there are added layers to adjust both light and shadows separately but within the Prettyizer group. In a layer within the group, Prettyizer finds & selects the highlights in an image and offer the opportunity to adjust the highlights if needed and to what extent. I find this very useful and quite sophisticated compared to other available action sets out there.
Further in Totally Rad you can reliably run an action set and then another on top of the other and then easy adjust the effect of both the action group set and the actions (layers) within the set.
Another difference is the *money-value* factor – with Totally Rad you get a lot of variation, a lot of different effects within one package, e.g., in the original Totally Rad set you get different monotone effects (B/W, sepia, blue cool tone and green tone), different cross processing effects, a retro color scheme, sharpening techniques and many many more.
In comparison other vendors sell their actions as separate sets, e.g., monotones (sometimes packaged per tone – sepia and b/w), sharpening, color pops, cross processing, vignetting as separate sets, priced a la carte between $5-$90 each – offers some combinations, but the resulting set is not comparable to Boutwell’s money / value – and not as easy to use.
What about Light Room? It is $300, for the non-academic version and it is still worth it. Lightroom is a preprocessor RAW converter and it does its job nicely. It also enables you to duplicate the effect of some actions and image adjustments (e.g., exposure, WB, sharpening, color pops, retro color, even cross-processing if you are adventurous).
I do think that it does blow some available actions out of the water, but I believe Totally Rad is still worth it. It complements Light room nicely and it gives you more effects that are not as easily reproducible in Lightroom and/ or not appropriate at that point in the workflow (e.g., different sharpening effects) and the Totally Rad actions are of-course easily adjustable after the fact enabling refining the tweaks after running them.
Disadvantages – right now I can think of only one glaring one and that is that you need to know a bit more photoshop before using them, otherwise you just don’t get as much out of them.
Which actions to get next? I would like to try the Kubota set – I heard a lot about them and I suspect them to be built similar to Totally Rad — but that will be sometime down the road.
