17³Ô¹ÏÔÚÏß

If you’re like me and use Adobe Photoshop for the majority of post production of your images, you may find that you are repeating the same set of steps in order to get consistent results across your work. Photoshop has a great tool built into it that can help you improve your workflow by replacing these commonly repeated tasks with an action. This allows you to combine and complete multiple steps with a simple click of a button or the use of a keyboard shortcut.

Photoshop has some actions pre-installed if you haven’t used them before, but you can record your own actions specific to your own editing. Here’s a quick step by step of recording your own action.

Recording an Action

• Open a file.  File Open (Ctrl O / Cmd O)
• In the Actions pane, click the Create New Action icon, or choose New Action from the action dropdown menu.

• Set a name for your action so you know what the action does from a glance. Here you can also assign a keyboard shortcut to complete the action once recorded. There is a full list of options so you can choose what suits you best. You can choose a list of function keys e.g. F2 and combine this with your choice of be this ctrl/cmd, or shift. Some function keys are excluded from the option as they already perform system functions such as F1 which is preset to launch Help in Windows.

•  After setting your Action Name and Shortcut Click the Record button. The icon at the bottom of the actions pane will now be red to indicate that tasks are being recorded into an action.
• Once you’ve started recording, perform the operations and commands you want – this can be as simple or complex as required. In the example screenshots I’m creating an action to boost the curves to lighten the image, but you can also use actions for cropping, boosting saturation or use them to automate effects like those covered in our previous tutorials for split toningÌý²¹²Ô»å adding textures to images. It’s worth noting that there are some tasks that cannot be recorded during the process; however, you can insert most non-recordable tasks using commands in the Actions panel menu.

• To stop recording, either click the Stop button,  choose Stop Recording from the Actions panel menu, or press the Esc key.

Now you’ve successfully recorded your action you can use it as may times as you need on your files. If you’ve set a keyboard shortcut just enter this to apply your action. If not you’ll need to select the action you want to apply and click the “play” icon. Alternatively you can set your actions to “button mode”, which will apply the change once the name of the action is clicked.

Resources of Preset Actions

If there is a particular effect you want to achieve, there are some great tutorials for making actions on . There are also free to download resources containing a variety of actions on and . If you download any of these you can load the action from the Action Pane menu. Select the .ATN file that you’ve just downloaded and it will be imported it into the list if actions. You can set keyboard shortcuts by right clicking the action and amending the properties.

Have you got any regular adjustments you use actions for or some go to sources for your action effects? Let us know in the comments.