Adobe Photoshop CS: Actions

This command is at Window ---> Actions (or Alt+F9 on Windows)

Actions are a great time saving feature if you want to perform the same modifications on a whole bunch of images in one shot. The first step is to record an action and then apply it to either one or a hundred images.

The Actions window in Photoshop CS is shown to the left.

To start to record a new action, open up an image and then click on the "Create New Action" button at the bottom and enter a name and, optionally, a hot-key for this action. To start the recording process, click the 'Begin Recording' button. Now you can start to make changes to your images - Resizing, Levels, Cropping, Sharpening, adding text, Saving-As and so on. Once you are done, go back to the Actions palette and click on the "Stop Playing/Recording Action". Now your action is ready for use on one or more images.

To use this action on just one image to test it out, open that one image and pull up the Actions palette. Select the action you just recorded and then click on the 'Play Selection' button at the bottom. The same actions you performed on your first image while recording, are now performed on this new image - down to saving to the same directory at the same JPG quality. This is a great way of making sure that you change all your images similarly - ie. cropped to the same size 25% or 50% and with the same color background if you chose to add it etc.

Once you are satisfied that the action is behaving as expected, the real power of actions comes through : batch-processing hundreds or even thousands of images in one go. The savings in time are phenomenal.

Go to File ---> Automate ---> Batch. This pulls up a Batch window where you can specify the source and target directories as well as the Action you want performed on all the images in the source directory. It has additional options for suppressing warnings and such which can be left alone for now.

Once you choose the source directory, say, C:\Images\FullSize\ and a target directory C:\Images\Processed, hit the OK button, Photoshop CS opens the files one after the other and writes the processed files to the new directory. Now you are free to go get a cup of coffee or surf around and after a few minutes have all your images neatly ready in the target folder.

In addition to writing your own actions, you can download actions from the web. Some of the more simple actions are free and add fancy borders to a given image. Sites like Fred Miranda's have for-sale actions that are tailored to do specific things for specific camera models - for example boosting saturation on a Canon G2 or reducing noise on another model.

These actions are available as Adobe Photoshop-proprietary .atn files. To import these .atn files into your Photoshop CS program, click on the arrow at the right-hand top corner of the Actions palette and go to 'Load Actions' and then browse to the location of the .atn file on your hard disk. Once this is done the new actions are available under the Actions menu for your images.

When I get back from a photo trip with cards full of images, I need to take a bunch of images from a camera, resize the full size images, add a border, throw on some copyright text on the border and sharpen up the images. Since this is the exact same action I perform for each one of the images, I can use Actions to take a set of 1000 photos I might have in one directory and create normal size images and thumbnails for each one of them in no time.

Remember to always have an original untouched copy of the file that comes off your camera. Make sure that any image that has had an action performed on it must not overwrite the original images but rather be saved-as in a separate directory. Here are some suggestions for managing a digital image library.

It is easily one of the most useful tools in Adobe Photoshop.

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