A contact of mine on Flickr just mentioned an action that I thought might be worth a look.
Here's the description of the how and what the action does:
This action tries to mimic a cross-processing technique used in some glamour, fashion, and urban photography. It skews and saturates colors, while dramatically increasing contrast. The action does all this by creating an aggressive curves adjustment layer (which is user adjustable). Secondly, the action creates a black layer which can be used to desaturate/mute the colors. This can be accomplished by changing the opacity of the layer.
Respective credits and this description are included in the
zip file.
Now personally don't really have any urban or portrait shots so I was eager to try it out on something different. So here as you can see is the result on one of my Beach Hut images.
The action is fully customizable at each step of the process and I really liked the results. Of course it's not for every photo!
If you wish to download it you can do so
here