Cre8veDesign

Let me apologize first as I will be posting a short video tutorial on using action scripts to create brush sets and batch work on your latest photos taken from your adventures.  I am currently pretty sick and the video would sound awful. So, if your a photographer and your tired of correcting single images at a time or you love creating your own brushes with multiple images stay tuned for part 2 which will contain the video.  Follow me on twitter or subscribe for the updates.

Let’s move on…

The process by which many in the industry handle images on a daily basis can be termed “work flow.”  Some construct their own and perform them in sequence; however, most people will automate their tasks to simplify things.  Photoshop gives you several options for this and create a great workflow.

There are five different kinds of automation available with Photoshop:

1. Filters/Plug-ins. The most common plug-ins is used for “filters.” A bunch of these come included with Photoshop and most of them perform a single function such as blur or unsharp mask.  The Software Development Kit is used to write your own plug-ins but that is not my area of expertise.

1. Actions.  These are created by recording a series of steps that you have developed yourself.  Note: You can also purchase actions as well.  You can execute actions individually from the Action Palette or you can use Photoshop’s “Automate>Batch” sequence to run an action on a bunch of files/images. For instance you can take several texture pictures with your camera like rust, gravel, chipped paint and so on.  Then you can separately
2. Droplets as in “drag-and-drop”.  In brief, a “droplet” is an icon that represents an action you’ve already bought or created.  This is an icon that sits on your desktop and if Photoshop is running you can execute a droplet.  If PS isn’t running it will start and then run the droplet.  You just drag the file or folder and droplet is executed.
3. Built-in automations.  Photoshop has a number of built-in automations that are very helpful but also very specialized. Some of these are nice but very few of these.
4. Scripts.  Though easier than the above SDK’s, scripting does require some scripting language but it is a powerful tool.

For now let’s talk about actions, mostly due to my lack of knowledge in scripting at this point in my career. Actions are easy to use.  You can create one by opening the Actions Palette, select “New Action”, name the action, and then hit the “record” button.  Then perform you steps and then hit “stop” recording.

The drawback to this is in regards in human judgment.  There will be no decision making steps; there will just be mass automation.  For example when trying to create a uniform sized image for the web.  You may want them all the same size to appear uniform; however, you will not be able to control the image orientation and may end up with some images cropped in bad areas. You could separate landscape verses portrait images to avoid some of this.

This was mostly about an overview of automation; I will provide a tutorial showing how to do scripts in the not too distant future.  What are some of your favorite actions?  Any great workflow you would like to share?

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