Playing around in Photoshop

I have been going through a lot of my Civil War reenactment photos and I wanted to try something new today. I put an image into Photoshop and ran a grunge action on it. Then I spent time tweaking settings and adding different brush strokes.

When the action was done at first, it was really dark, so I had to adjust the levels to bring up the shadows a bit. I brought the background into the image a bit more, but didn't want to make it too noticeable because I wanted the soldier to be the main focus of the image.

I am going to do a more in depth tutorial on photoshop actions later and I will include an action for you all to test out. Photoshop actions can have some pretty cool effects to your images, just like this one.