Save Your Time by Using Photoshop Actions

Photoshop has many great feature to help designer making their job easier. One of this feature is “ACTIONS”. Today I wanna tell you how to use “ACTIONS” in Photoshop and how this feature will help you finish your job quickly.

Recommended Reading: 5 Easy Photoshop Tips to Improve Your Design Works (and Avoid Beginner Mistakes)

What is Actions

Actions is a feature that allow you to record your tasks on Photoshop and replay your task with single button. Here some default action you can see on Photoshop:

If your actions panel didn’t show up, you can find it on “Window” menu and choose “ACTIONS”.

How To Use Actions

To be able to start the action from “ACTIONS” panel, you must click one of the action there and then click “play” button at the bottom of “ACTIONS” panel. Here I’m going to choose “Gradient Map”.

On “LAYERS” and “HISTORY” you can see Photoshop has doing 3 tasks and 1 task behind the screen. first, made a snapshot, convert image to RBG mode, create a “Gradient Map” layer, and set “Gradient Map” layer to “Overlay” and opacity to 70%.

How To Create Actions

Look how easy your job if you apply an action in your design project, it will save you a lot of time. In my case, I usually using “ACTIONS” to corp, resize and save a lot of images in one specific folder.

Here example how I create a custom action. I have some images to resize and save in preview folder:

Open one file in Photoshop and start to create action. First, create new set of actions and give a name.

Click “Create new action” button and give a name. In function Key, you can choose the button that will active your action later, here I choose [F1]+[Command] button.

Now resize and save the image on “preview” folder.

And then close the file “twitter.png”, here I choose “Don’t Save” because I don’t want to modified my original file.

After that click “Stop” button.

Now to apply the action, open another file, select “resize icon” and click “play” button from “ACTIONS”panel or press [F1]+[Command] button on the keyboard.

And all the images save in “preview” folder.

This is only one basic example that “ACTIONS” feature in Photoshop can do. There are so much more variations that you can do with “ACTIONS”.

Here some reverence for you to know more about Photoshop “ACTIONS”:

• http://helpx.adobe.com/en/photoshop/using/creating-actions.html
• http://www.photoshopessentials.com/basics/photoshop-actions/
• http://photography.tutsplus.com/articles/100-free-photoshop-actions-and-how-to-make-your-own–photo-3502

If you have any questions or want to share your opinions, fell free to say in the comment form below.

– Written by Yahya –