Automating Your Workflow: Actions in Photoshop, Part 1
You know the grind.
There's that one step you do each time you edit an image that requires a few key presses and menu inputs. What started as an awesome new workflow element has since become a mundane amount of time that you must work through on each new image.
Enter Actions, Photoshop's in-software automation tool. Click a button, and all those steps you used to do are done auto-magically by Photoshop. It's hidden behind one little palette window and rarely gets much use other than when you download actions from someone else and load them up. Ever wonder how to make your own? I'm here to show you how. In part one of this tutorial series, we'll talk about creating basic actions involving simple steps, and some common pitfalls that you can avoid falling into.
Opening the Actions Palette.
So let's start with the dead basics- How do you get to Actions? It's ridiculously simple. There are three options.
- Click the little Triangle icon to the right side of the screen, next to the main palettes.
- If it's not there, go to Window>Actions.
- If you want to be super quick and use a keyboard shortcut, hit Alt+F9.
Running an Action.
And you thought opening the Actions Palette would be the easiest step! Running an Action inside of Photoshop is as simple as selection the Action you'd like to run, and then hitting the little play button at the bottom left of the Palette.
Recording A Simple "Blur" Action.
Now for the fun part- Making your own action! There are two parts to the Actions system: The Action Set, and the Action itself. The Set is the little folder icon that holds all of the individual actions.
So to get started, click the folder icon on the bottom of the Actions Palette. This will start a new Set for you to save your actions into.
Now, to create an action you hit the New Action button (The little square with the fold!) at the bottom of the Palette. A dialogue box will pop up asking for you to name your Action, among other things. You can set a key bind to activate it, and you can set a color to identify it in the Actions palette for when you get horribly addicted to automating everything and have to categorize to find your way around!
We're not recording yet though! To start recording, simply hit the little circle icon at the bottom of the Palette. Once you hit that, everything (Well, almost everything, but we'll get to that at a later date) you do is recorded into your new action. So let's create that blur action!
- After hitting the record button, create a new blank layer by hitting the New Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers Palette.
- In the Image menu, select Apply Image and hit Okay.
- With the new layer selected, go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur.
- Choose whatever blur radius you'd like!
- Hit Okay.
- Go back to the Actions Palette and hit the Stop button (The square one at the bottom!) to finish recording.
- To review the steps in your action, hit the drop down arrow next to the action name.
So everything there was pretty straight forward except for one step, right? I'll guess it was the part where we Applied the Image onto a new layer.
For right now, just understand that we do this as to not destroy any data. If we didn't do this, we'd be affecting whatever layer we have selected- Effectively destroying the previous data in place for that layer. It's better to have a new layer with your new effects on it so that if something goes wrong, you can just delete it and get back to the previous layer! This is called Non-Destructive editing, and it's a very important thing to learn when you're getting started in Photoshop.
Pitfalls to Avoid.
So there are some major pitfalls to avoid with Actions. The biggest of which we already touched on, and that is doing destructive edits that over-right data. Always create new layers!
Secondly, if you have to duplicate a layer that existed before you ran the action- Do not right click and hit duplicate layer during the action! Apply the image onto a new layer instead. The reasoning for this exists in layer names and orders. Your Action will error out if the layer you duplicated doesn't exist when you try to run it again. And if you have something that uses a name that's in your action? That can cause some messy issues with the Action over-writing layers that weren't even involved! We'll talk about some other ways to get around this in our next Action tutorial.
Third, if you make a mistake, don't panic. There are ways to fix it, and you don't have to delete your entire action! We'll talk about those ways in our next Action tutorial.
Finally, don't try to rely on actions constantly. You don't want to automate everything, as some things really do rely on subjective data that lies inside of the image- Meaning you have to make the decisions! Now, there are also some ways around this inside of Photoshop CC, which we will talk about in our next Action tutorial.
Thank you for reading and if you have any questions, drop a comment below!