Adobe Photoshop Actions Explained - Speed Up Your Workflow by Automating Photoshop Actions

1. Photoshop Actions Explained: have you ever wanted to learn about actions inside a voter shop? Actions can help speed up your workflow by providing custom and pre made steps to adjusting your photographs or images. In this quick course, I will show you the basics of actions and how actions work. You will see some of the default actions that are already installed on Photoshopped. Finally, I will show you how to automate actions to save you valuable time at the end of this class , I encourage you to try out this fun feature inside a photo shop, save out your work and then upload your finished image as a project to this class. It's always a blast to see what the students have created. So if you are interested in leveling up your skills by learning actions inside a photo shop than enroll now and I will see you in the first lecture 2. Creating Photoshop Actions: So we're going to be talking about actions. What is an action? Well, in photo shop and action is a list of commands that you record that you were. You can recall to do certain functions over and over again, and basically these help speed up your workflow. They could be very simple, or they can get very, very complicated. And the great thing is, you can actually buy actions online and find actions online of things that people have already pre created. Bring them in. Photoshopped hit one click of a button, and it will activate that action for you. So let's take a look at how you would create an action inside a photo shop. I'm going to go to the top and I'm going to click on Windows and then I'm going to click on actions, and here you can see some pre made default actions that photo shop comes loaded with. Now, we're not going to look at these right now, so I'm just going to go ahead and hide this and I want to create a new action. So I'm going to hit the new action button and we can given a name I can put it in any folder so we could have different folders for different types of actions. I can give it a function key. So if it's something that I do repeatedly over and over again every day, I might want to give it a key that I can just hit one time and have that action fire. And I can also color coded for easy organizational use. But I'm just going to go ahead and hit the record button here and at when I do that, you can see a new action is created. And what's happening here is it's going to record every single thing that I do in photo shop until I hit that stop bun. Now this could be selections. This can be edits. This could be filters, re sizing image adjustments. It could be anything pretty much what you do in photo shop. It's going to record that action, and then we can recall it later on. So let's take a look at that. So I'm going to go up to image. I'm going to go to adjustments and then hue and saturation, and I'm just going to bring the saturation down to a negative 100 de saturate out this image and hit OK as soon as I hit OK, you can see that it has recorded the hue and saturation action inside of my main action here. If I open that up, you can see what it's done. My saturation is negative 100 so it has recorded that process for me. Now let's go ahead and add another one just so we can see this. I'm going to go back to image adjustments and I'm going to go to, let's say, photo filter and I'm gonna put on a warming filter. Move this up to 81% fine and hit OK and you can see it's recorded that action. That photo filter inside of my main action one here, and it gives those values. Now I can keep on doing all kinds of things. I can resize this document. I can make edits. I can apply filters, but this should give you a pretty good understanding of how these work. I'm going to go ahead and hit the stop button, and now we have this image. Well, let's say I want to apply the same effect to a number of other photos that I have. I can do that easily with the action that I created. I'm going to go ahead and hide this layer and show you the layer underneath it, which is just this coastline, and make sure that you have the layer selected before you run the action. Otherwise, it won't work, so it needs a have the active layer selected. I'm going to go upto action one and I'm gonna hit the play button, and when I do it automatically d saturates the image and applies that warming. Filter that photo filter for us. So this is an awesome, powerful tool. It allows you to really speed up your workflow and allows you to get a lot of a lot of things done very quickly, because if there's something that you do every day on a constant basis, over and over again, record that as an action and you will be able to just repeat that with a click of a button 3. Examples of Default Actions: Now that you know what actions are and how they are made and how they work inside a photo shop, let's go ahead and take a look at some pre made actions that come installed with Adobe Photo Shop when you download the software. Now, there were hundreds and thousands of actions online that you can download and buy, and they have all kinds of different things that you can use with him. So I definitely suggest going online and looking up Adobe Photoshopped actions If you are interested in in this, so go to the top click on Windows actions. If it's not open already, and here you can see some default actions that photo shot comes loaded with. Now you'll see in parentheses that some of them are based on a type player. Some of them are based on the selection. Some of them are layer dependent. So, for instance, let's take a look at this type one, and we will need a type player. So I'm going to turn on these, um, two layers here, and this is a type player. You can see that, um, it's got the transparent background, and I can pick on the typography tool and edit this text. But since this is a type player, I'm going to click on cash, Shadow and hit play, and it will run the action and you can see it casts a shadow like it said. And if I open this up, I can see everything that needed to happen for it to get to that point where it would cast that shadow so you can see that some actions are going to be based on different types of values and what have you. I'm going to go ahead and hide these and open up my railroad tracks again, and you can see there's some other actions in here. We have simple things, such as saving Ah, Photoshopped. Pdf files. If you do a lot of pdf downloading and you need to convert them, this is an easy way to do that. Um, some of, um are based on selections where you can create vignettes based on a certain selection. Some of them are going to generate a new layer, and it's just going to be like a texture on its own. So, for instance, if I run this molten lead action, it's a texture and know what's going to do is it's going to open up a new layer and make a molten lead texture. Now, if I open that up, we can see all the things that needed to happen. To create that texture. I'll go ahead hide that we have another action that we can look at called quadrant colors, and this is a cool action when I run this. Basically, it takes an image, and it splits it up into four quadrants and gives it a different color. It's kind of a cool little graphic design effect. If we open that up, you see and needed to convert the image, duplicate the layer de saturated, addressed the levels of curves and then set this selection and then change the color for each one of those quadrants. So here are some pre made actions that are really great that you can use. However, there are a lot more. Ah, lot people don't know about this. But if you click on this little box in the top right hand corner of the actions panel, you can see down here we have a lot more actions. We have them based on commands, frames, image effects, black and white techniques, production actions, stars and trails, text effects, textures and video actions. So, for instance, I can go to my image effects, and now you can see we have a bunch of image type actions. So if I select on age photo and I run this action, you can see that it's going to do that effect, which looks awesome. Um, we have textures which are the kind that kind of just opened up a new layer and do their own thing. So if I do sandpaper and run that action, you can see that it's going to create a sandpaper type image for me. And we have ones that are good for production, so you can see some of them are just changing the canvas around or doing a fit image, batch processing and so on. We have video production actions. We have text effects. There's just so many different things that you can actually do with this software that looks and works really, really great. So I hope you enjoy this. Check out all these wonderful actions and then go online and look at all the actions online because there are a lot of them, and I think you'll really enjoy him 4. Automate Photoshop Actions: So by now you have seen actions. You've seen what they can do, and you've seen a bunch of different types and examples of actions. But actions really become powerful when you start automating your workflow with actions. So you understand now that you can just open up a image, run in action and apply filter or in effect, and then you need to go in and save that out. Well, the cool thing about actions is you can actually do a batch processing, which allows you to apply filters and effects and actions across multiple photos and automatically save them out without even having to be in front of your computer. So let's go ahead and take a look at how that works. So I'm going to go upto window. I'm going to select actions, and I want to make sure that I have image effects actions in this panel. If it's not there, go ahead and click on this box and then go down to image effects and select it, and we're going to use the aged photo action. Now, one thing that you need to note here is it will run this action, but it does not save it at the end of this action, and that is something that we need to add into this action. Otherwise, whenever we run the batch process, it's gonna hang up on the first image, because when it gets to the end, it's not going to know what to do afterward. We want to save this document and then we want to actually close this document. So let's go ahead and run this action one time so that we can see what it looks like. And then I'm going to click on Unsure Mask, which is the last part of this action. Then I'm going to hit the record button because I want to save. I want to record the Save Command. So now I'm going to go to file and let's just do a basic export so I'll go to export safer Web. We could do J P g medium. That's fine. And I'm just gonna I have a ah image folder on my desktop. New images is where it's going to end up. Soldiers hit safe. So now we have our export function, so once it runs this, it will export it out. And now we want to close this document, so I'm going to go to file close, and I don't need to save it again. Now what's happening is that action is actually still running in. The background is still recording, so we need to make sure that we turn it off and don't have anything else extra in there. So let's go ahead and just open up a new document real quick. And as you can see, it's still running. And it created a new make document. Well, we don't want to create a new document every time. So let's stop this click on Make and then go ahead and delete that out. We don't want that selection there, So now it runs. The filter runs the action at exports image. Out is a J. P. G. And then it closes the file force, and this is what we want. So now I'm just going to go to file automate batch and here it might be set up with some default settings and actions. Now I'm going to go ahead, change it to image effects, and you're only going to see the actions here that we have opened up in the actions panel. So if you want to use other effects, you'll need to go open those up as I showed you. So I'm going to click on image effects. We want the age photo. That's what we're running. We want our source to be folder now. We could also open up a bunch of files and do it that way. But we're running a folder, so I want to come in here, make sure that I have desktop image is selected. I can leave all these things just how they are. I actually don't need that on. And I need a destination folder. So I'm going to choose new images. See your desktop images, new images. Okay, so everything is set up. We can leave the document name and the extension as it is. You could also add in numbers and dates to this if you wanted to. And it shows you what the example of that's going to look like right here. So now all I need to do is hit the okay, and what it's going to do is going to look into the images folder that I created and let me show you what's in there. Cancel out of this real quick. So in the images photo, I've got five images Berries, Doc Lily, popcorn and tracks and then a new Images folder. There's the one we just saved. Let's go ahead and delete that out just so doesn't try to override it. So we have five images in this folder. That's what we're going for here. It's going to go in. It's going to open up those five images, run the action and then automatically export it out as we told it to let me just look over this and make sure we have the right settings. Okay, everything looks good. Let's go ahead and run this. Now I'm gonna hit OK, and it opens up the first image, runs the action exports and closes it. There's a second image, the third image. As you can see, this goes really quickly. Fourth image. And here is the last image. Okay, so now it has completed all those images. It has stopped all the actions, and that went really quickly. So I'm going to minimize this. And now, when I opened up the new images photo, you can see that it has actually applied that filter to all five of my images. So this is the power of using actions inside a photo shop is that you are able to come in here and actually edit and at filters and cool effects to your photos, images, graphic design artwork, whatever you're working on, you can put branding on here if you wanted to. You can resize photos, but you can batch process them all at one time and save you a lot of time, effort and energy. 5. Assignment - Submit Your Photoshop Project: you have now, come to the end of this course. I really hoped you gain some insight into actions and how powerful they are inside a photo shop. Hopefully, you found out some techniques or tricks that you can use in your own photographs or graphic design work. So if you would like to go ahead and follow me on this platform, I'll be producing more of these types of photo shop courses. Um, little quick bite size courses to teach some things inside a photo shop that I know how to do. So go ahead and follow me if you would like to learn more about that, and you can contact me anytime started discussion. I'm always around, so I like answering questions. If you have any questions about photo shop for this course, go ahead and Assos and I will get to them as soon as possible and a couple more things before you leave. If you could please leave me a review by clicking the lever view button and giving me a yes or no thumbs up or thumbs down on. If you like this course, if you tell me what you liked or didn't like, it helps me as an instructor know what to do better in the future, and it also helps future students see if this is something that they would be interested in . And then, finally, you need to submit your project. So either click on the read more, but next to submit your photo shop project or go up to the top and click on the your project tab, and this will open up the project description. You can just see some text here of what I want you to do but scroll down to the bottom. And then here you can fill out a title and a description and upload an image. So what I want you to do is go on photo shop, use an action, either create one of your own or use one of the pre made actions and then save out that image and uploaded to this course so we can see what you've created. And it's a great way to get critiques and feedback on your work. So I hope you enjoy this course. Definitely. Follow me. If you would like to see more courses like this, if you have any specific courses that you would like to see me made. Go ahead and start a new discussion in this class and request something. And maybe I'll make a course just for you in the future. So I hope you enjoyed it. I look for to see you and for future courses, so take care.