photoshop actions

Time to Remake Actions

admin Blog, Tech Reviews January 10, 2019January 8, 2019photoshop actions

This is a really important but simple thing to do. At the beginning of the year it’s important to update all copyright elements with blog and website elements. It’s kind of tedious and time consuming but it’s an important element to protecting your photography. One thing that I have always done is use a hidden watermark in my photos that includes a copyright year. It’s in most of my actions so going back through and changing each one can get annoying but there’s an easy trick to it. Simply go to your actions, turn off button mode, select the action that you need to change and delete just the items that need changing. Simply run the action with those steps deleted and then you can start recording where you left off and make new changes. It doesn’t take too long and you don’t have to rebuild everything.

New Year, New Actions

admin Blog, Tech Reviews January 10, 2018February 1, 2018photoshop actions

It’s a new year which means it’s time to review all those old settings and presets that you have which contain the year 2017. One plugin I use all the time is Digimarc which adds a hidden watermark in my photographs. If a photo of mine is going on the web then it has to have that watermark. It’s just safer. With Digimarc you have to include the year into the watermark so that you can track it. Each image gets its own code and that’s part of it. This means that every year I have to change it. Actions are great time savers and when it comes to blogging it helps to have all those steps prerecorded. Nice thing about Photoshop actions is that they are easy to change.

This is what my action panel looks like in Photoshop CC 2018. There’s a bunch of different ones that make life easier for all the occasions that pop up. This panel is how you activate them. In the top right are three lines which allows you to switch to button mode.

Once you check button mode you can rerecord, delete or alter actions.

If you use actions and you need to alter it, there is a really simple way. Simply delete the steps that require a date and any after it and then rerecord the new steps. Then if you have multiple computers you can always save the actions and transfer them over. Of course if you use the save as command you will have to designate the folder since that varies between comps. It sounds like a pain in the butt but once it’s done, it’s done. Get the chores done early in the year so you can focus on projects throughout the year.

Actions are your Friend

admin Blog, The Teasers February 1, 2017photoshop, photoshop actions

There are many ways to speedup your workflow when it comes to post processing. One of my favorite ways is to use actions. In Photoshop, actions can be used to combine multiple steps into a single click of the button. These can be anything from applying a group of presets, a filter or different save settings. A good way to know if it’s worth making an action is if you are doing the same thing over and over again. Great example, every photograph I blog needs to go through a series of steps including bit size, color profile, image resize, watermark and saving. It takes way less time to make an action for all of that instead of doing it every time by hand.

Now I brought up actions because I recently had to redo mine. There’s one step inside each of my actions that I have to redo every year because of the date. Well that’s a lot of actions to completely rewrite. Well here is a handy shortcut. If you’re not in button mode then you can see all the steps in each action. Remove the section that needs to be replaced in one action and then highlight that new step. Go up to the top and click on the top right corner and a drop down menu comes down and in it it says duplicate. It will then duplicate that highlighted step or steps. Basically you can duplicate any step in any action and then move that step into another action. Once you duplicate, you delete the old step that the new step is replacing. This is a really simple and fast way to replace steps in actions without redoing the whole action.