Welcome to part two of our introductory look into Photoshop actions. Last time we covered the basics of what an action is, how to run one, and how to make one. Today we’ll start with a look at a few more features within the Actions Palette in Photoshop.
Once again, the Actions Palette is located up under the Window menu across the top of the program. If it isn’t already open, pull it up and bring up a list of some actions. You’ll notice two little check box-like things next to each action name that we didn’t discuss last time. The left box toggles a particular action on or off. Alternatively, clicking the arrow next to an action’s name shows all the steps contained within and you can toggle individual steps on or off as desired.
The right check box toggles dialogues on or off. Turning dialogues on will pop up any prompts required as Photoshop runs through an action. This will require user input to run through an action; you will have to hit okay at each dialogue window that appears. This is handy if you want to make slight deviations from an action’s default behavior or simply want to see what a particular action is doing. Leaving this box unchecked will not display dialogues and Photoshop will run the selected action on autopilot.
Also in the Actions Palette, if you expand a particular action to view its contents, you may select individual steps and delete them as needed. This is especially useful if you make a mistake while recording and want to remove the unwanted step; simply hitting undo while recording an action will result in the action recording the undo command.
One of the most exciting things about actions is the ability to download user created actions and load them into Photoshop. A simple Google search for actions will return thousands of results, some good, some bad. When you’ve found an action that you want to try, download it to a convenient place on your computer. Open Photoshop and pull up your Actions Palette once again. The upper right of the palette will have a drop down menu with the option to “Load Actions.” Simply navigate to where you saved the new action(s), select them, and they will appear in the palette ready for use.
Finally, actions can be applied to a whole group of photos by tapping into Photoshop’s batch processing capabilities. The batch feature is accessed under the File menu under the Automate heading. Select Batch and the batch processing window appears. From here you can select a desired action and specify how Photoshop should deal with saving the newly processed files. Let it go, grab a sandwich, and come back to a completed group of photos.
This concludes our look into actions in Photoshop. Hit the comments on either article with questions and start exploring the potential with these powerful tools.