Recently I was contacted by SleekLens.com and asked to review one of their products (in exchange for a copy of the actions for my own use). So, full disclaimer, I stand to gain nothing by either offering a good review or a bad review of these actions. Therefore this will be an open and honest review of what i've seen of them so far
After a fairly easy installation (if you're familiar with PS actions as I am), you are presented with a list of actions. These are split into 8 sections as below
This all seemed to be well laid out, starting section one with basic exposure alterations, then into base alterations (for colour adjustments) and then into tone. The section after that gives you the ability to apply a one stop shop quick application of "All in one" adjustments to your image (I assume if you're in a hurry). Section 6 offers some specialist effects, with a temperature adjustment and webfile prep actions in section 7 and 8 respectively.
I decided to try to process one of my images taken recently at a nearby lake to see what was on offer with these actions. I havent used all of the actions, rather a subject of them which I thought would be applicable to the image
Here is the original image
I started my processing in the "Exposure" group of the action set.
Firstly, I tried the "Reduce Highlights" action to take down some of the glare from the sun behind the trees, see below
Then, I brought back some detail in the shadows using the "Brighten Shadows" action, see below
The image was left without a great deal of contrast after this, so I gave that a boost using the contrast action :-
Having got to a stage where I felt the image's exposure was ok, I ventured into the "BASE" section. I ran the "Autumn Colors" action against it. Initially it was too strong, do I reduced the opacity to 20% to give the golds, browns and reds some pop:-
I was quite pleased with this, so moved straight onto the TONE section and added a "Cinematic" tone. Again, the 100% opacity was too much, so again, I dialled it back down to 20%, see below :-
I read in the accompanying PDF file that there was a "Sunset Flare" action in the SPECIALTY section. This seemed like a good image to try this against, so ran it. It creates a new layer with the flare on. You can then resize the flare and place it where you wish. Shame about the spelling, there's a few of those through the action list which could be so easily mopped up with a bit of QA!
This image shows the flare enlarged, placed over the sun and the opacity dialled back to 50% :-
I also created a less opaque flare for the reflections in the water, see below
So, here are the before and after images using the SleekLens.com Landscape Adventure PS Actions
Conclusion
I'm a bit of a Lightroom fan if i'm perfectly honest and I do find PS actions a bit slow (and a little restrictive) for my workflow in general, but there are some solid actions in here if you are prepared to give them the time (and are perhaps more inclined to use PS for your editing). I will almost certainly come back to these actions again and give them another try.
Finally, I thought I would process my image quickly using Lightroom to see the difference. This took me approx 3 minutes from start to finish, but I freely admit this maybe as a result of my experience in Lightroom
You can see more of the product offerings from SleekLens at the links below
The Landscape Adventure workflow https://sleeklens.com/product
SleekLens also offer a Photo Editing service at https://sleeklens.c
Other SleekLens Photoshop actions on offer can be found at https://
For interest, there's a YouTube video on how to work with the Landscape adventure PS workflow:
https://youtu.be/D7me9grhlK0