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How to use Actions

Hi!  I'm going to teach you how to use actions in photoshop!  An action is anything you program photoshop to do for you.  Actions are most useful when you have a number of menial tasks to do on a large number of pictures.  I learned this when I had over a thousand pictures I had to resize, put a filter on, and save into a different folder.  It can turn an hours worth of work into fifteen minutes.

First you need to find the actions tab.  It's usually right next to history on the right (check the picture, using cs2) between colors and layers.  Check the windows tab to see if the actions folder is open. 

 

Once you find it, you'll see it has many of the same buttons as the layers window.  From the left to right, the buttons are stop, record, play, create a new set, create a new action, and delete. 

If you're going to be using alot of different actions, it might helpful to create your own set;which is like creating a folder of actions.  Click the button that looks like a folder, then name the set whatever you want, "josh's actions, special actions, ninja actins, etc."

Now we're going to create a new action.  You can pretty much make anything an action, but you don't want to use it for something creative, such as making a special selection, renaming something specific, or painting a whole picture, but if you have to do the same exact thing fifty times, actions shine.  Let's say I have a folder of 50 images that I need rotated, resized, and saved in a different folder.

FIrst, click the new action button, which is between the delete button and the new set button.  A little window will pop up giving you the option to name the action, put it in a specific set, give it a color, and even map it to a hotkey (yes you ca n have your own hotkey!).  I'll name it, "rotate/resize", and put it in the set, "josh's actions" and since I'm really lazy I'll give it the hotkey F1 + shift.  Now press "record".

Now it's in record mode.  Anything you do will be recorded as that action.  Even save, quit, and undo, so be very careful, and very intuitive.  Now I take one of the pictures I'm  working with and do all the stuff I need to do.  I rotate it, resize it, save it in a different folder as a jpeg, then I close it out.  When your done recording, press the stop button.

Now you have your very own action!  You can use it any time, just go to your actions menu, find the action, highlight it, and click the play button, and photoshop will do all the menial tasks you'd normally not pay an intern to do.  Or, if you're as lazy as I am, you can just use your hotkey! 

If you need to change an action it's very easy.  Let's say I wanted to get rid of the rotate option, add a filter, and change the folder in which it's saved into.  First, go into the action, and click the little arrow next to the name.  All the specific tasks in that action will be shown.  From here, I'm going to highlight the "rotate" option, and press the delete button, or just drag it to the trashcan.  Then, I'm going to highlight the resize option, press record, add the filter I want, then press stop.  This places the filter right after the resize but before the save option.  Finally, double click on the save option and you can change the settings you save with.  Isn't that nifty?

Be creative with your actions!  Some things I've used them to do:

-I've had one image with multiple drawings, made a selection on one of the drawings, copied it, opened a new document, and pasted it to have the drawing as a new image.

-I was making a texture for a model; I made an action to merge all the layers, save it as a targa, then undo the merge layers.

I hope this is helpful!  Tell me what kind of actions you made or had to use it for!

 

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