Photoshop CC: The Missing Manual

Chapter 19. 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. It would also be great to automate tasks that you don’t really enjoy doing yourself.

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 (Building Panoramas with Photomerge).

• The Lens Correction filter (Camera Raw Filter), which fixes distortion problems caused by your camera’s lens and/or sensor.

• Automated layer aligning and blending with the Auto-Align and Auto-Blend Layers commands (covered starting on Auto-Aligning Layers and Photomerge).

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 them ...