Photoshop CS6: The Missing Manual

Chapter 18. Working Smarter with Actions

Sure it’s fun to spend hours playing and working in Photoshop, but once you’ve used the program for a while, you’ll start to notice that you repeat the same steps over and over on most of your images. At first, the repetition probably won’t bother you—it’s actually good while you’re learning—but when a deadline approaches and the boss is eyeing you impatiently, you need a way to speed things up.

Luckily, Photoshop includes all manner of automated helpers (some of which you’ve already learned about), including these:

• The Image Processor script, which resizes images and converts them to different file formats (Automated Resizing with the Image Processor).

• The Contact Sheet II script (Printing Multiple Images).

• Automated photo stitching with Photomerge (Auto-Aligning Layers and Photomerge).

• Automated lens correction that fixes distortion problems caused by your camera’s lens and/or sensor (Lens Correction).

• Automated layer aligning and blending with the Auto-Align and Auto-Blend Layers commands (Chapter 7, beginning on Auto-Aligning Layers and Photomerge).

• Adobe Bridge, which can create web galleries and rename lots of files at once (Chapter 21).

Some of the best timesavers of all, however, are actions—all-purpose, amazingly customizable systems for automating mundane tasks like adding or duplicating layers, running filters with specific settings, and so on. You can use actions to record nearly every keystroke and menu choice you make and then play ...