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How to make photographs look lomo using Photoshop

If your anything like me, you've recently purchased a digital camera (SLR in my case), joined flickr.com and heard everyone talking about lomo photography. Lomo photography or lomography as its known, seems to be everywhere nowadays. If your into technical details then you can check out the history of Lomography at Wikipedia. For everyone else it's best to explain what this style of photography is by using examples. The first thing you'll notice about all these images shown below, is that they contain very high color saturation. This is one of the main characteristics found in lomo photographs.

This first example was found at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/31457759@N00/146763376

http://www.flickr.com/photos/96385007@N00/383229371

And now for one of my favorites:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/31678222@N00/304653851/

As you can see from the examples above lomo photo effects work best with images that contain high color, stone rock or gravel textures, as well as shiny objects like metal.

One way of creating lomo images is to buy a LOMO camera. For example a Lomography Fisheye camera has a built-in wideangle lens that shoots fisheye distorted photos with high color saturation.

However, if you don't own a LOMO camera, then you can achieve the same effect using a lomography photoshop action that can be downloaded for free from Emanuele Feronato.

Here is an example of what the free lomo photoshop action does. This is the original image:

As you can see the dull sky probably isn't the best to try this on as it's washed out. However, you can still get the idea of what the free lomography photoshop action does in the image below:

UPDATE: Our tutorials for photographers are now being continued over at SLR Photography Guide.