Adobe Photoshop CS5 for Photographers - Martin Evening [311]
Sourcing ready-made actions
When you first install Photoshop you will find some actions are already loaded in the Default Actions Set and you can load more by going to the Actions panel fly-out menu and clicking on one of the action sets in the list (see Figure 15.1). There are also many more Photoshop actions that are freely available on the Internet. A useful starting point is the Adobe Studio Exchange site at: www.adobe.com/cfusion/exchange/index.cfm. This site offers readyprepared actions or sets of actions with examples of the types of effects achieved with them for you to freely download for use in Photoshop.
Figure 15.1 Here is the Actions panel showing the panel fly-out menu options. You can easily add more action sets by selecting them from the list.
Working with actions
You can record a great many operations in Photoshop using actions. Photoshop actions are application scripts you can use to record a sequence of events that have been carried out in Photoshop and any actions you record while working in Photoshop can then be replayed on other images. If there are certain image processing routines that you regularly need to carry out when working in Photoshop, recording an action can save you the bother of having to laboriously repeat the same steps over and over again on subsequent images. Not only that, but you can also use actions to batch process several images at once.
Actions are always saved within action sets in the Actions panel and these can then be saved and shared with other Photoshop users so that they can replay the same recorded sequence of Photoshop steps on their computers.
Playing an action
The Actions panel already contains a set of pre-recorded actions called Default Actions.atn. If you go to the Actions panel fly-out menu you can load other sets from the menu list such as ‘Frames’ and ‘Image Effects’ (Figure 15.1). To test these out, open an image, select an action from the menu and press the Play button. Photoshop then applies the recorded sequence of commands to the selected image. However, if the number of steps in a complex action exceeds the number of available histories there will be no way of completely undoing all the commands once the action has completed. As a precaution, I suggest you either take a Snapshot via the History panel or save the document before executing the action. If you are not happy with the result of an action, you can always go back to the saved snapshot in history or revert to the last saved version.
The golden rule when replaying an action is ‘never do anything that might interrupt the progress of the action playback in Photoshop’. If you launch an action in Photoshop you must leave the computer alone and let Photoshop do it's thing. If you click on the finder while an action is in Playback mode this can often cause an action to fail.
Photoshop actions are normally appended with the .atn file extension and saved by default to the Photoshop Actions folder, inside the Photoshop Application Presets folder, but you can store them anywhere you like. If you want to install an action that you have downloaded or someone has sent to you, all you have to do is double-click it and Photoshop will automatically load the action into the Actions panel (and launch Photoshop in the process if the program is not already running at the time).
Recording actions
To record an action, you'll first need to open a test image to work with and you must then create a brand new action set to contain the new action. Next, click on the ‘Create new action’ button at the bottom of the Actions panel (Figure