Practical Photoshop April 2022

"Welcome to issue 133 of Practical Photoshop! If you enjoy the issue, why not subscribe and get a whole year for just $19.99?" Actions are one of the most powerful yet overlooked Photoshop features. Whether you want to speed up your own edits or use those created by others, Actions can be hugely useful. This issue we bring you an in-depth guide. Elsewhere, learn how to edit your videos in Photoshop and make misty effects. www.digitalcameraworld.com Editor James Paterson Art Editor Rosie Webber Production Editor Kyle Hearse Content Director Chris George Senior Art Editor Warren Brown DOWNLOAD THE PROJECT FILES To download this issue's files, type the following link into your web browser on your PC or Mac: https://bit.ly/pho_133 FIND US HERE… http://bit.ly/practweet http://bit.ly/pracface Also available on: http://bit.ly/pp_pocketmags http://bit.ly/pp_app_store http://bit.ly/zinio_pp…

Actions are a Photoshop feature that lets you record a sequence of steps, so that you can repeat the steps on other images. As such they’re great timesavers, as you can record monotonous edits and then play them back on other images, shaving minutes off your workflow. In theory, if you perform a task once then you never need to do it in full again – simply create an Action and let Photoshop do the rest. Over the next few pages we’ll explore the basics of Actions then go on to show you how they can be used for all kinds of practical and creative projects, from creating the cover image to making timesaving crops and stacking timelapse sequences. DOWNLOAD THE PROJECT FILES HERE http://bit.ly/pho_133 ON YOUR PC OR MAC…

Go to the Actions panel and click the plus icon at the bottom to make a new Action. Give it a name and hit Record. From this point until you press the stop button in the Actions panel, every edit, command, brush stroke and setting you change will be recorded in the Action. You’ll see steps appear in the panel for each change you make. Some of these can be expanded to give you more info on what is included in the step. After pressing the Stop button, you can repeat the sequence on other pictures by highlighting the Action name and pressing play.…

When it comes to playing back an Action, pressing the Play button in the Actions panel is rather a clunky way to do things, especially as the point with Actions is to speed up your workflow. There are a couple of ways we can speed things up. If you click the flyout menu at the top of the Actions panel and turn on Button mode, then the Actions will be shown as a list of buttons. Simply click on an Action button to play it. Another way to speed things up is to assign keyboard shortcuts to your favourite Actions. You can do this upon first making an Action (in the New Action dialog), or you can add keyboard shortcuts afterwards by double-clicking on the Action in the Actions Panel…

As you build up your collection of Actions – either by creating your own or downloading those made by others – your Actions panel can quickly become crowded and disorganised. Action sets are like folders for organising Actions. Make new sets by clicking the folder icon at the bottom of the Actions panel and then drag Actions to the set. You can also assign new Actions to a specific set when creating the Action in the New Action dialog. Another useful organising feature is colour coding, which works when in Button mode view. You can assign colours to actions in the Actions options (double-click an Action name) or in the New Action dialog. So you could, for example, colour all your cropping Actions red, and your tonal Actions blue.…

Often you’ll want to include steps in your action that require you to input a setting, as a sort of manual override. After making the action click the little box next to the step in the Actions panel. Now the action will pause at this step to let you tweak settings manually. If after making an Action you want to tweak the automatic settings that are applied in a certain step, then there’s no need to go back and record the whole thing. Just, double-click the step in the Actions panel and only that step will play. If it involves a command with a dialog – like a tonal change or filter effect – then you can tweak the settings in the command dialog, then apply them. The new settings…