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Working with Actions in Photoshop CS

by Seán Duggan

Once you start working with Photoshop regularly, you’ll probably notice that the same task, or group of tasks, is often applied to many of your images. This can be something as simple as resizing your photos or rotating them to a correct orientation, to multi-step procedures that prepare an image to be printed, or sized and optimized to a certain set of specifications for display on a web site. When you reach this point, then it’s time to start taking advantage of Photoshop’s Actions to automate some of the tasks that you use all the time. In this tutorial, I’ll take a look at the anatomy of the Actions palette and cover how to create some simple actions, as well as editing existing actions. I’ll finish up with some coverage of the Batch processing options for applying actions to many images at the same time.

An Action is simply a set of commands that you apply to an image that are recorded and can be used again to save yourself the time and keystrokes. Creating an action is as simple as pressing a record button and then going through the steps you want to record. Almost any command (or series of commands) can be recorded as an action that can then be used on a single image, or multiple images. With Batch Processing, you can even run actions on an entire folder of images. For instance, if you open your digital camera images and find they you always add a Levels and Curves adjustment layer for basic color and tonal correction, you could automate that step so that Photoshop does it for you. You can even program the action so that it pauses at the Levels and Curves dialogs so you can customize them adjustment for each image. Actions can also be used for simple, single-command tasks, such as hiding or showing specific groups of palettes, or bringing up commonly used filters and dialoga, such as Unsharp Mask and Image Size.

Several third-party Photoshop products, such as PhotoKit from Pixel Genius, are based on sets of complex actions that apply specific alterations to an image.

Before we get into recording an action, let’s take a look at the different controls in the Actions palette.

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