PSC07: Actions

Did you ever find yourself in a situation where you had to do the same post processing step over and over again to a bunch of files and had wished for a way to get done with it much faster? Well, that's where Photoshop actions come in. Not only do they allow you to automate repetitive tasks, I basically have my whole workflow almost fully automated this way, and what previously took 5 minutes per picture is now down to less than a minute.

Action!

You might be familiar with the concept of Macros from other applications, where you record the steps that you perform and then play them back later. Actions in Photoshop are very similar to that, but they give you quite a few more possibilities.

Starting simple

Let's build our first simple action. In Photoshop, make sure you have the Actions Palette open. If it's not visible, select Window -> Actions from the menu. At the bottom of the Actions Palette, click the "Create new set" icon, that's the third from the right. Let's name this new set "Playground" and put all the actions from this Photoshop Corner in there in order to keep things tidy.

Now for that first Action, let's resize an image to 50% of its size. Open an image first, then click the "Create new action" button at the bottom of the layers palette. In the "New Action" dialog that appears now, type "Resize 50%" for the name and if you wish, you can even assign a function key for those frequently used actions. Once you click OK, you'll notice that in the Actions Palette the red record button will light up. The things you do in Photoshop from now on, will be recorded into this action.

Let's select the opened image, then click Image -> Image Size and select 50%, making sure that the "Constrain Proportions" box is checked. Click OK in the Image Size dialog and watch the action show up under your new action. Now click the stop button in the Actions Palette, that's the black square all the way to the left and you're finished creating your new action.

From now on, whenever you select the "Resize 50%" action on an image and press the little play button in the Actions Palette, you'll resize an image to 50%. Easy, isn't it? 

More Action

If you followed along Photoshop Corner from the beginning, you'll remember episode 04 where I showed you the advanced sharpening method using layers. Let's try to re-create this with an action.

Again, first open an image, then click the "Create new action" button in the Actions Palette. Name the new action "Cool Sharpening" and once you click OK, you're in recording mode.

In order to re-create the action, let's simply re-create the same steps that we did when we did the sharpening in episode 04. First, duplicate the layer by dragging it to the new layer icon in the Layer Palette. Name the layer "darken", then go to Filter -> Sharpen -> Unsharp Mask and set the parameters to 500%, 0.4 pixels Radius and 0 Threshold. Click OK, set the blending mode for this new layer to Darken and set its opacity to 0%. Duplicate the "darken" layer again, then rename the new layer to "lighten" and set its blending mode to "Lighten". Now press the stop button in the Actions Palette and you're ready to use this action on any other picture.

In order to execute it, just select an image, select the "Cool Sharpening" action from the Actions Palette and press play. Now just raise the opacity of your darken and lighten layers as much as you need to get some good sharpening and you're all set.

Nesting things

Now let's explore the actions even further. Did you for example know that you can nest actions in order to re-use specific actions within others? You could for example set up an action called "My Workflow" that first does some colour correction, then resizes the image and at the end applies the "Cool Sharpening" routine that we just recorded. In order to achieve this, just start playing an action while recording another. The new action will then call the existing action whenever it's run. This way you can set up a whole arsenal of small action snippets that you can use as building blocks for larger actions. Very flexible and a real time saver.

And this was just a very brief look at actions, I will go into more depth in one of the future Photoshop Corners.