Using Photoshop Actions

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:

Using Photoshop Actions

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

Using Photoshop 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”.

Using Photoshop Actions

Using Photoshop Actions

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%.

Using Photoshop Actions

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:

Using Photoshop Actions

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

Using Photoshop Actions

Using Photoshop Actions

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.

Using Photoshop Actions

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

Using Photoshop Actions

Using Photoshop Actions

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

Using Photoshop Actions

After that click “Stop” button.

Using Photoshop Actions

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.

Using Photoshop Actions

And all the images save in “preview” folder.

Using Photoshop Actions

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”:

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

– Written by Yahya –

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