Tutorial: Introduction to "Actions" in Photoshop

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Tutorial: Introduction to Actions in Adobe Photoshop® by DonnieV

Introduction

I often find that I want to do repetitive tasks in Photoshop and it is quite time consuming to manually do them on each photo. I am going to illustrate the use of Actions to make things a bit easier. I use Photoshop CS2 so some of the techniques may not apply to earlier versions. Keyboard shortcuts are provided for Mac and PC.

To demonstrate the use of Actions, we will create a simple Action that adds a shadow to any image with just a single click of a button.

Step 1

Open the "Actions" palette and click on the new action button:

Actions in Photoshop: Step 1

Step 2

Create a new Action and name it whatever you like. Click on the record button to start recording

Actions in Photoshop: Step 2

Step 3

Duplicate the background layer (Mac: Command+J, PC: Control+J). This is necessary because we are going to resize the canvas.

Actions in Photoshop: Step 3

Step 4

Increase the Canvas size by 10% and fill with white (Mac: Command+Option+C, PC: Control+Alt+C).

Actions in Photoshop: Step 4

Step 5

Make sure you have Layer 2 selected as shown in step 2. Click on the Layer Styles Button:

Actions in Photoshop: Step 5a

Step 6

Select the stroke color and thickness you want and make sure you choose "Inside" so the border isn't rounded. Don't click on OK yet. Click on the "Drop Shadow" check box and create a shadow that you like.

Actions in Photoshop: Step 6

Step 7

Now click on OK and then click on the stop record button.

Actions in Photoshop: Step 7a

Now whenver you want to add that effect all you have to do is hightlight the action in the Actions palette and then click "Run" which is the triangular arrow. A single mouse click does all the work we just did manually.

Some of you may be asking why we used a layer style for this instead of drawing a rectangular border on the image. Using a layer style does not affect any pixels on the original image so if you don't like the effect you can just drag it to the trash. Also, if you want to change the stroke or drop shadow you can just double click on the layer styles symbol (on Layer 1) and you will get the dialog box we used above.

I hope you found this useful. Once you begin to use Actions you will find you can automate many tasks and cut your editing time significantly.

(c) Copyright 2006, DonnieV & EyeFetch.com. All rights reserved.

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