Click on any phrase to play the video from that point.
[♪♪] [ADOBE TV Presents]
[The Complete Picture with Julieanne Kost]
Hi and welcome. My name is Julieanne Kost.
In this episode of The Complete Picture
we're going to be discussing some shortcuts and techniques for creating actions.
If you want the basics of actions and batch processing and maybe droplets,
then what I would recommend is a different video.
That video can be found on Adobe TV under the Evangelists area.
So if you go to the Channels area on Adobe TV, on the right-hand side
you'll notice there's an Evangelist for Photography.
Go ahead and click on that, and you'll see Russell and myself.
Click on my programs right there,
and then scroll on down.
You'll have to go quite a ways, and you will see two different videos.
One is on Automating Photoshop Using Actions,
and that's about 45 minutes long, so it really covers the basics.
And the second one is on Advanced Automation Using Actions,
Droplets, and Scripts, and that's about an hour long.
So this is going to be a short tutorial
just trying to cover some of those things that I might have missed
and new techniques that I have thought of since then.
So let's go back to Photoshop.
Okay. The first thing is there's actually two preferences that I want you to set.
Well, one is a preference and one is an option.
But if you're recording actions and you're playing actions
and you are running batch processes on a ton of images,
these can be quite useful.
So the first one is under the Photoshop Preferences.
Go ahead and select the Performance area.
Over here on the right-hand side where it says History States,
you might want to decrease that
because if you're working with really large files
and you're keeping track of a lot of history, that's going to take up a lot of RAM
which you really don't need to do if you're just batch processing using actions.
So you might want to bring that all the way down to zero.
But don't forget then when you're actually working in Photoshop
to increase that if you want a number of undos.
All right. So that would be the first thing.
And then the second thing is actually on the History panel itself,
select the History Options here.
You might want to turn off this option to Automatically Create First Snapshot.
Again, if I'm just working in Photoshop and I'm not running actions,
I want that turned on because what that allows me to do
is actually go back at any point in time and maybe select an area
and fill it with history if I've made a mistake.
But when running actions, this can make them run a little bit faster.
All right. Let's go ahead and look at a few actions here. I have three of them.
The first one, this Selective Sharpening, all it does is it converts my background.
So if we look at my layer, it would convert my background into a smart object.
It runs the high pass filter.
Because it's a smart object, this becomes a smart filter.
It sets the filter effects.
And in this case what it's doing is it's changing the blending options to overlay.
And then I had it come up and actually ask me to set the filter effects.
I know that it looks like it's doing the exact same thing,
but this is actually going to change the parameter of the high pass filter,
whereas this was setting the opacity and the blend mode for that filter.
So they do two different things.
But the reason I want it to come up again is because every image might need
a little bit different setting.
And so this allows me to toggle on a dialog box.
The way you would just toggle on a dialog box is you simply click in that empty well,
and the next time a dialog box will come up.
And then down here at the very end you'll notice I have something else
which is called a Stop.
You get a stop in your action by just using the fly-out menu here
and inserting a stop.
It allows you basically to type a message.
So if you need to tell someone what to do in the middle of an action,
a stop is a great way to do it.
If it's an optional thing they can do, then you can click Allow Continue.
I just thought I would mention that.
So if, for example, I run the Selective Sharpening action, we just hit Play,
it goes through until it gets to the point where it actually asks me,
"Hey, what do you want to set this at?"
And one of the things that it didn't do that is a really cool technique
is that it didn't ask me to view this at 100 percent.
So right now I would have to manually do that.
Well, let's cancel this for a minute.
What I'm going to do is I could hit to record again,
but there are actually a few things under the View menu that don't get recorded.
One of these things, which is Actual Pixels, is not going to be recorded.
So even if I hit the Record button and I choose under the View menu
Actual Pixels, there won't be a menu item there.
But if I come over to my action and I say Insert Menu Item
and then I choose View and I come down here to Actual Pixels
and I click OK, that inserts that right here.
Let's hit Stop because I don't want to continue recording.
I actually need this to do that before I'm actually going to set my filter parameters.
Then what it would do--and we can play just a single step in our action
by double clicking on it--see what it does? It brings it up to 100 percent.
I would obviously need to use my space bar to go and move around
to look at different areas, but at least it brings it up to 100 percent.
All right. So let's go ahead and move down here to our last step here.
We'll go past the last step, and then we'll hit Play.
You'll just notice that it went ahead and did the rest of these steps.
Basically, it added the sharpening and then it created a mask here.
Well, the mask was there because it was a smart filter.
It filled that mask with black, so we're actually hiding the sharpening.
But it did select the brush, it reset the swatches
so that I know that I've got the correct color selected,
and then it just tells me to paint in the mask to add sharpening as needed.
So basically, because the mask is black, it's gone ahead and hidden all the sharpening.
But if we zoom back out here, all I need to do--
because I already have my brush selected because the action did that for me
and I've got white as my foreground color--
is I would just paint in those areas that I want to appear sharpened.
Of course we can change the brush size and just paint that in.
And you can see over here on my mask for my smart filter what we've done.
So that's kind of adding the dialog box toggle,
which we did by just clicking next to the check mark in the action--
obviously, the check mark would turn on or off that step in the action--
and then the Stop and then also we covered the Insert Menu Item as well,
which will go ahead and view our image at 100 percent.
Okay. Let's move down to the next action, which is this Add Stroke.
The reason that I put this in here was just to show you that it was recorded
with the units set to percentage.
And the reason that I did that is because if you want to add something like a stroke
to an image but you're changing image sizes,
then you'll want to record this so that it makes the selection, for example,
at 5 percent as opposed to a specific XY coordinate
so that no matter what size or orientation image you select,
it will always select from the 5 percent mark to the 95 percent mark
or whatever your selection is.
So the way you would do that is just simply show your rulers,
Command or Control R, and then you can right mouse click in the Ruler area
and you can set your units of measurement here.
So just make sure it's set to Percent, and that allows me to play this action.
And it actually brings up the layer style
because every time I run this action I might want a different colored stroke.
So I could click in there, and then I can just click wherever I want to select the color from.
So maybe I want a little bit more of a red color, so we'll select that, click OK,
click OK again, and it will continue on down the action
until I've created not only a stroke but there's an inner stroke
and then there's also kind of this border here, which is just a border filled with black.
But again, the nice thing is I could run this action on a vertical image,
a horizontal image, a square image.
Because I have the unit set to percentage, it's going to work.
Be a little cautious because there are some things that don't work like that.
For example, settings for your Guassian blurs,
settings for your sharpening, they are going to have to be changed
for each image individually, so that's another great instance where you would use a stop.
Okay. Now let's go to this next action right here.
I'm going to go ahead and hit Play.
What it does is it just selects the background layer--
actually, not the background layer, the lowermost layer.
You'll notice here because I've turned this into a smart object
it's not actually called background anymore.
So it's very important in an action like this where you want to select a specific layer
that you don't actually click on that layer with your mouse or with the pen
because what that does is it targets a specifically named layer in your action.
So what you need to know are a few keyboard shortcuts
in order to kind of navigate the Layers panel.
So I'm going to scoot over here back to Safari for a minute,
and I just want to show you, this is one of the posts that I've done to my blog.
My blog is just blogs.adobe.com/jkost.
I did a quick search right up here on the right-hand side
for Targeting Layers via the Keyboard.
And sure enough, you can see here if you want to get the list of keyboard shortcuts
to target different layers, so for example, the Option key--or the Alt key on Windows--
plus the left bracket or the right bracket targets the layer
above or below the currently targeted layer.
So these are all ways to select specific layers or multiple layers
by not selecting them by name because that name will be recorded in the action
but by selecting them on the position that they're located in the Layers panel.
So this can save you a ton of grief, and there's a whole list here
that obviously you can look at. I don't need to read them off.
So let's go back to Photoshop for a minute.
What if I really liked this whole adding the stroke and the Fade Color From Center?
Why are they two separate actions, right?
I might want to include them all in one.
Well, if I have a series of commands that I like
and I want to add them to another action,
all I need to do is select them, hold down the Option or the Alt key,
and just drag them to the other action, and that will make a copy of those commands.
So now, for example, if I go to this other image right here
and then we just decide to add this stroke action,
when I hit Play, I might actually want to rename it
because not only is it going to add a stroke--let's make that blue.
It's not only going to add a stroke, but it's also going to go ahead and kind of fade
from the center of the image to gray scale around the edge.
You can see it's really easy to combine different actions
and to Option drag from one action to another.
In fact, while you're recording an action, you can actually play the action,
and it would include that in the recording, including the batch command.
So your actions can get super complicated if you want them to.
All right. Speaking of actions and saving actions,
you might want to distribute these actions. So how would you do that?
You can't save an individual action, but you can save a set.
So I would recommend that you click on the folder
and then you can choose to save your actions.
If you've got a single action selected,
you'll notice that you can't save them; it won't let you.
So be sure to select the set.
And of course your set can just have one single action in it if you want it to.
But that's how you would go ahead and save a set of actions.
Speaking of saving actions, you can also save your actions as a text file.
The only warning that I will give you is that it saves all of your actions at once.
So you might want to save your actions just as ATN files
and delete them from the Actions panel
if you wanted to save out just a single action as a text file.
Or we can go ahead and just hold down Command, Option, Shift--
Control, Alt, Shift on Windows--and then choose Save Actions.
You can see it gives me a text file.
We can just save this to the desktop.
If we go to the desktop and we open up that text file,
you can see it saved all of my actions there.
But if I just wanted one of them, I guess I could just go look for the one that I wanted
and then just grab that and copy that and then paste it into another text file. All right?
But you should know that you are actually able to save your Photoshop actions as a text file.
But you can't load that text file back in.
There are two conditional features as well.
If you go underneath the Automate menu,
you'll notice you can do a Conditional Mode Change and Fit Image,
which is also conditional.
What Conditional Mode Change allows you to do is run an action on a ton of images
that might be in different color modes,
and it basically says, "Do a change from one color mode to another if necessary,
"but if it's not necessary, just ignore it."
Fit Image is really convenient because it allows you to work with both horizontal
and vertical images at one time
and run a batch command on them.
And when you're doing image size, it will simply fit it into a box.
It's not going to distort it; it just fits the long dimension as the width or height,
whatever values you put in here.
And there's one last thing that I will mention
because I found it very difficult to figure out what the difference was,
but that is the difference between double clicking a step in an action
and Command double clicking a step in an action.
So if I just select the background, for example,
and let's just for right now grab the Marquee tool and I'll make a selection,
if I double click on a step, what Photoshop will do is it will actually bring up the dialog
for that step.
And if I make a change to that step, it actually makes a change in my action,
whereas if I hold down the Command key or the Control key
and double click on a step, it simply plays that step.
So let me just show you. For example, I've got the Fill here.
If I simply double click on the word Fill, it brings up the Fill dialog box,
and then I could change something like instead of using black,
I'll say use white and click OK.
You'll notice now that in my Actions panel that action has now been changed.
It will fill with white as opposed to black.
If I hold down the Command key or the Control key and double click the Fill command,
all it does is fills it and moves on to the next step.
And so I really find that when I'm troubleshooting actions,
holding down the Command key or the Control key
and double clicking on a step or double clicking on a recorded command
can help me troubleshoot it because it actually plays that command
as opposed to bringing up the dialog box,
which of course then if I make a change will change that action.
Well, excellent. I know that was kind of a mix of tips and techniques,
but I think they're all really quite valuable.
And they took me a long time to learn, so hopefully by putting them together
in a short period of time, it'll really help you guys get a jump-start
on automating your workflow.
My name is Julieanne Kost. Thanks for joining me on this episode of The Complete Picture.
[♪♪]
[Executive Producer - Bob Donlon] [Producer - Karl Miller]
[Director - Kush Amerasinghe] [Post Production - Erik Espera]
[ADOBE TV PRODUCTIONS] [♪♪]