My free Instagram-style Photoshop action

If you’re looking for an editable Photoshop Action that replicates that Instagram/Hipstamatic retro look on your DSLR or compact camera shots, you’ve come to the right place as I made one I love to use myself, and it’s all yours for free.

The iPhone photo app market is now completely dominated by filters and effects, mostly emulating the imperfect plastic lenses and saturated colours of Lomo cameras in particular. Of course, pretty much everyone thinks of just one name in that area now: Instagram. But before Instagram, the regular number one photo app was Hipstamatic. Between the two I ended up using Instagram much more once I discovered it, but whenever I launch Hipstamatic for a change I’m compelled to spend the next few days playing with it again, rediscovering old lens/film combos and happily stumping up 69p a pop for new Hipstapaks.

Whatever your favourite is (and if it’s not your thing, you should probably stop reading!), a lot of people would like to easily apply that sort of look to their compact camera and DSLR shots on their computers. It can be a lot of fun applied to the right image, and especially in collages. There’s plenty of apps, especially on the Mac App Store, dedicated to this sort of thing but personally I’m a Photoshop guy. Maybe you are too, and maybe you’re looking for a nice easy Action to try?

Well, it just so happens…

I’ve happen to have one! It’s an adjustable Action for Photoshop that produces a lovely, stylised result very reminiscent of Hipstamatic and all the other Lomo-style apps out there, and in the true spirit of Christmas I’m going to run you through it and give it away as a free download to install into Photoshop.

The overall effect has over-saturation, blurring around the edges, high contrast, a heavy vignette and a small blurry border (that’s never the exact same twice). It’s pretty heavy handed but I liked it, as you can see!

I’ve dusted it off and gone through the Action, giving proper names to each layer and adding a couple of ‘options’ to turn certain features on or off. Introducing my roll-your-own Photoshop Action for old-school Lomo/Holga/Hipstamatic-style images, which I’m calling:

my plastic eye – Instagram-style for Photoshop

How to download

You can download the action from my site totally free – just use one of the buttons below:

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Downloading

Thank you! Just click this link and your download will start!
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How to install

The Action downloads inside a zip file. Once you’ve got it, expand the zip to reveal the ‘my plastic eye.atn’ file inside.

Either double-click the .atn file to auto-install, or open Photoshop and choose Load Actions from the Actions panel menu, locate and select the ‘my plastic eye.atn’ file, and then click Load.

Open the image you want to edit, select the Action and press Play at the bottom of the panel. Make sure you’re selecting the Action itself, and not the folder it resides in, also called ‘my plastic eye’!

How it works

This is designed to work best with square images, so you may need to crop yours first. It does work with other shapes but square is best.

The first thing it does is duplicate the background so that at the end of the action, you will be able to turn off the entire effect group and see the original cropped image.

At this point it creates ‘scratches’. They’re best aligned horizontally to suggest scratching from ‘winding film’. Once the action is complete they can be quite subtle and effective but recently I’ve preferred the effect without them. If you want to turn them off just ‘expand’ the action and un-check all stages between the two ‘Stop’ points.

Next, a small amount of radial and zoom blur is applied to the scratch layer, renamed to ‘Scratches & Blur’. This is duplicated and the new copy given a Gaussian Blur to add a subtle overall softness and glow. You can manually adjust the blur level by clicking the box next to the check box in the expanded Action view. This toggles the dialog box on when the Action runs.

The Vignette and Bright Centre layers do exactly what they say. To adjust these just slide their Opacity around.

The Crossprocess layer and the Contrast layer both adjust contrast, but you don’t really want both on at the same time. By default, Crossprocess is on. It skews the colours a little, and you can feel free to adjust opacity, blending or even the curve itself for whatever mood you’re after.

If you prefer the original colours of the image, turn off the Crossprocess layer and consider turning on the Contrast layer in its place. The Saturation layer above it again does what it says – a touch of extra ‘pop’. On the other hand if you prefer your images slightly desaturated slide it the other way, although that’s not the best way to make a B&W photo but you can delve into that yourself if you like!

Finally, a ragged black border. It’s based on original images that are around 2800px x 2800px at 300ppi, so you may want to adjust the basic border settings if your source images differ significantly from that. Because of how the border works, it should never be exactly the same twice although it’s so soft you’d not really notice.

One more thing – you’re working with a layered Photoshop file so if you want to see what your image looks like without any given layer, click the eye icon on the left of the layer thumbnail. For example, you might want to turn off the blurred border in the final image. Just click the eye so it’s hidden, and then save as a flattened JPG as normal, and the border will not be saved.

And you’re done

That’s it! All layers are adjustable and wrapped up in a Group that you can turn off to easily compare with your original image. All that’s left to do is flatten and save it, which I leave to you. To get you inspired, at the end of this post there’s a few shots I made with it to demonstrate ‘before’ and ‘after’. Once you’ve made a few of your own why not upload them to the ‘my plastic eye’ Flickr group? :)

Please feel free to use this however you like – if you use it in your professional or published work it would be cool to hear about it so please do let me know! My only request is that you don’t distribute the Action for profit, or without a link back to this page.

Here’s the download locker again, to save you scrolling back up:

[sociallocker id=”9206″]

Downloading

Thank you! Just click this link and your download will start!
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If you like free Photoshop effects…

I also cooked up a really great comic book effect from a few tutorials I found online. It does a great job of recreating the hand coloured and inked look of comics, I think it’s probably the best I’ve ever used. I’m a bit biased, though, check it out for yourself.

Thanks for reading!