5 Tips for Photoshop Efficiency

By Corrie Haffly
2008-03-27


3. Create Actions

If you find yourself doing a task in Photoshop that follows the exact same steps over and over again, you may find it helpful to create a Photoshop action to automate those steps. A common example is if you have a bunch of photos that you’re resizing from high resolution to web-ready formats. Let’s say that your boring, repetitive steps consist of:

1. Opening the photo.
2. Going to File > Image Size and entering in a new width or height, then clicking OK.
3. Saving the photo for the web in a different folder.
4. Closing the photo without saving.

Instead of going stir-crazy by doing this for all of your 257 photos, let Photoshop do the work by creating an Action! Here are the basic steps for making your own custom Action:

1. Open the Actions palette by going to Window > Actions.
2. Click the “Create new action” icon in the bottom of the Actions palette.
   

   

3. Name your action – for example, “Resizing photos.”
4. Notice that the recording button is immediately active, so any commands that you do in Photoshop will be recorded. If you’re not ready to record, hit the Stop button. When you’re ready, click the Record button to begin recording again.
   

   

5. I would start with the photo already open before recording (you’ll see why later on). Then, you can proceed with your normal steps and perform your tasks on the photo, including saving the photo for web and closing the photo without saving. As you perform your tasks, you’ll see a list of Photoshop commands building under the Actions palette. When you’re done, hit the Stop button.
   



6. For this particular example, however, I’m going to deviate slightly from what I would normally do. Let’s say you have a mixture of landscape and portrait photos. When resizing the image, you would pick the larger dimension and change that size. Creating an action this way, however, would force you to make two separate actions – one for portrait photos, one for landscape photos. Luckily, Photoshop has a built-in command for “fitting” the resized photo into a certain area. So when recording my action, instead of going to Image > Image Size, I’ll go to File > Automate > Fit Image and type the width and height that I want the image to be resized within.
   



So, my Action would really look more like this, with the Fit Image instead of Image Size command:

With your action complete, let’s test the action. Open up another photo, click on the name of the action in the Actions palette, and hit the Play button. Photoshop will go through the steps of your action. Check to make sure that the photo was resized and saved for web properly.

If all looks well, you’re ready to batch and automate! Go to File > Automate > Batch. Most likely your new action will already be selected, but if not, select it from the dropdown list. Change the Source to Folder and click the Choose button to set the folder to your collection of high-res photos that need to be resized. Also set the Destination to Folder and set this location to where you want the web-ready photos to be saved. Finally, you can set the other options for renaming the saved file or overriding commands as necessary. One important option to set is to change the Errors dropdown to Log Errors to File, click the Save As button, and select the filename and location for your error log file – this way, if Photoshop runs into a problem, it will log the issue and keep going instead of stopping the process completely.

Then click OK, sit back (or go take a lunch break), and watch Photoshop perform its magic!

Tutorial Pages:
» 1. Learn to use keyboard shortcuts for accessing tools
» 2. Learn more keyboard commands to make your life easier
» 3. Create Actions
» 4. Learn non-destructive editing techniques
» 5. Get organized

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