Hello everybody, Yanik here for Yanik’s Photo School, and today we’re going to be looking at a video tutorial on how to create Actions in Photoshop. Now this new tutorial falls into a brand new category on Yanik’s Photo School that I’ve just created called Optimizing Workflow. Now everything going into that category will be to optimize your time to minimize the amount of time you spend doing on something whether its post processing like we’re going to be all seeing today or lighting or pre-shoot organizations, everything, all the tutorials that are related to that will be going into that category called Optimizing Workflow. Now today we’re looking at a Photoshop way of optimizing your workflow and it’s a pretty good one at that it’s how to create an action and then apply it to other images. Alright, now the first thing that we need to do is to make sure that your Actions Pallet is up, and what you do to do that is you go into Window and the first one down is Action, and you can either select it from here or the shortcut key is Alt F9, and once you have that you’ll see that some actions are already there. Those are our default actions created by Photoshop and basically it just gives you a bit of samples and what you can do. Let me just show you, for example if I take Wood Frame and then I go down below here, click the Play button and then you press Continue, Processing and there you go, it put it a Wooden frame around it, if I go to 100% you can see that it added a nice wooden frame of about 50 pixels around my whole picture. So that’s an example of an Action. Let me undo this, go back into my History Pallet, and if you want to see the details of that action, you can actually click down on the arrow here and you’ll see everything that was recorded into that action and that’s what we’re going to be doing today.
Not as elaborate as this, like this action, but just to get you going on actions, now let’s say we want to record an action here, the first thing we need to do is look at our bar down here and the first button here is the Stop button and that’s why it has that circle on it because we haven’t started anything. The next one is called Begin Recording, next one is Play, after you’ve recorded you want to play it on your other images, you can create another folder and use stead of actions, and this is the button you’ll need to start off with, and the last one is Delete, of course, and, but this is the important one to start a new action is create new actions, so you want to click on that and you want to give your action a name, let me just call this one Child Blue, for the blue background. And then I click Record, and then anything that I’m going to be doing now in the Photoshop, you’ll see up here right below Child Blue here, let’s say for example I want to adjust the Curves on this image, you remember the curves video that I did not too long ago, go into Image, Adjustment Curves or Control N, and this time I want to give this I mean, a bit of a Pop, a little bit of an S curve here, this looks good, click OK, oops curves just appeared under the Action that we’re creating. Now let’s say that we want to, I don’t now, crop this image a little bit, actually let’s resize it, let’s say we want to go to the Image Size, and we want to resize it for the web, so I want a 640 pixels on the long side, click OK, I can bring it up to 100% and see what it looks like, and you see here Image size appears. Now let’s say I want to put a border around this image, let me get my Black Color Up image, Canvass size, and go into pixels, let’s say you want a 10 pixel border around this, so we need 10 on each side that will make 20 all together, so 660 here and 448 here, select our color, Pure black, Ok and there we go. I like this and let’s stop this recording now, there we go. So in this recording we have Curve, Image size, and Canvass size. Alright, now if you want to apply this to another image, let me just close this image up, I won’t save it, let me just open another image from the same shoot, and all I can do is click on the main, actually if I bring the air up, just click on the action that we did, then go down to play, click on the play button and voila, it takes a fraction of a second, bring this to 100%, and we have our image adjustments, if we look at Before and After, of course, Before is 100% so, and it did everything in my image here, it’s that simple. You can even have it saved, whatever you want, it can be saved automatically as well, and if you include it in your action. Alright, and this is the tutorial on how to create an Action in Photoshop. Now in our next video tutorial, we’re going to push this even further and again this will go into the Optimizing Workflow category, we’re going to see how the Batch Process of actions or Multiple Photos all at once, and that will save you tremendous amount of time. Again, this is Yanik Chauvin signing out for Yanik’s Photo School.