ABSTRACT
Actions in Photoshop Photoshop added Actions (recordable macros) back in version 4.0, which was released in November 1996. The original engineer, Sean Parent, fi rst designed the ability to record a series of processing steps to be able to play them back later. Prior to version 4, everything you wanted to do in Photoshop literally had to be done mouse-click by mouse-click. Back then, when imaging artists and photographers usually worked on a relatively small number of image scans, that wasn’t too terrible. Today, with photographers producing tens of thousands of digital captures, life without actions and batch processing would be unbearable. Not everything in Photoshop can be recorded as an action. For example, brush strokes of brush-based tools can’t. However, you can record the selection of a brush tool and set the parameters. Fortunately, the functions that can be recorded are extensive and can contain an enormous number of steps. Figure 11.1 shows an example of a long and complicated action originally recorded by Bruce Fraser for the PhotoKit Sharpener automate plug-in. We doubt that we’ll be giving too much away by showing this fi gure – you can’t actually see the recorded parameters, just the order of the steps. We’re showing this only to illustrate just how complex an action can be. This isn’t even the most complicated action that Pixel Genius has created; that action contained just under 200 steps written by Martin for PhotoKit Color 2. What should you record as an action? Our rule is that any step or series of steps performed manually on a repeated and regular basis should be considered a candidate for an action. A simple example might be recording an action to take an active selection and save it as a channel. How many times have you navigated to the Select menu and used the Save Selection command? Sometimes, you may perform one series of steps which could be recorded followed by some manual steps that must be done by hand, followed by yet additional steps that can be recorded. Actions can be recorded to handle those situations. Ultimately, many actions will be most useful when run on many images in a Batch process. I’ll cover recording and batch processing in detail, but fi rst I’ll introduce you to running actions you already have. Hopefully, I’ll show you how to make your actions speak louder than words!
