This is how I conquered the Lomo effect in Photoshop, it’s a combination of a couple other people’s tutorials and an idea of my own which I’ll tell you right up front. I googled for two days trying to find a Lomo filter that I liked that made EVERY picture look good, and found that they turned alot of pictures whacky colors or too light or too harsh and such. So my idea is not a one click wonder, but rather a two step process that takes a little bit more work for each picture. first of all you want to make sure your ruler is set on percentage so that this will work for different size photos.. go to (edit/preferences/units and rulers) and set rulers to percent. *note* if you are using an indexed color picture change it to RGB.

Step 1.
click on (Image/adjustment/levels) and adjust the arrows until you like it… do this yourself for each and every photograph until the colors pop out with a richness you like. this is basically my secret, seperating the color levels adjustment from the automation process like this..

Step 2.
Go to the Actions tab on the right and click the little arrow to the right and ‘new action’ and start recording. Name the action ‘lomo’ or something meaningful like that.

1. The first thing you want to do is create the vignette that Lomos are known for. We’ll achieve this by doing a freehand circle lasso around the photo. It doesn’t need to be perfect, and to prevent hard edges, we’ll set the feather to 100 px before drawing the circle.

2. Once you have set the feather and drawn the circle, invert your selection. (Select/Inverse)

3. Create a new layer. (layer/new) name it ‘black’ to be simple about it. switch your foreground and background colors to black and white.

4. Make sure you’re working on your new blank layer and use the Paint Bucket tool to fill the layer with black.

5. Deselect everything and duplicate the black layer. (right click on the layer down on the right menu and select ‘duplicate layer’) Change the ‘blend mode’ on one of the black layers to “Overlay” and the other one to “Multiply”. (right click, blending options/blend mode) put the multiplied layer on top of the stack, and the overlayed layer right underneath. Adjust the opacity on these layers as you see fit.

6. Create a new layer. Name it ‘white’. switch your forground and background colors. Select the gradient tool (it might be hiding under the Paint Bucket tool). In the options bar up top, select “Radial Gradient” (fuzzy bubbley looking one) and make sure that you have ‘Foreground to Transparent’ set as your gradient type. you should have a white gradient that gives way to transparency.

7. Click in the middle of your photograph and drag a straight line to the furthest edge of the canvas. This will throw down a round white gradient right on top of everything. make sure this layer is on top, if it’s not, just drag it up on the right hand layers menu.

8. Change the blend mode for your new white layer to “Overlay”,(right click/blending options/blend mode) and bring the opacity down to 25 percent or so, or whatever you think looks best, could be more…

9. press the square at the bottom left of the actions tab to stop recording and now you have a set of lomo actions that you can use repeatedly. you just have to do the levels to get lomo color for each photograph, then hit your lomo action bar that has the name ‘lomo’ if that’s what you called it, and press the play arrow underneath.

i also post adjust my black layers and white layer, to darken them or lighten them for each photograph as well.. anyway, hope this helps y’all.. happy lomoing!!

credits and downloadable actions for what I just said are in the read more section, but remember you have to do the color levels yourself, and I have made the black vignette and white layer fairly light and usually manually adjust later…
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