Creating an Action
Digital editing is a huge part of photography these days, and whether you do very little post production on your images or not, you are likely to be spending a significant amount of time at the computer. The chart below ( from http://www.ispwp.com/the-secret-life-of-wedding-photographers.html) displays how the average wedding photographer spends their time, and as you can see the largest chunk of it is not spent behind the camera but rather behind the computer.
In order to keep your sanity and personal life intact as photographer, the more time efficient you can make your editing, the better, which brings me to the point of my post, if you have not met yet, please let me introduce you to actions. Moreover, let me show you how to create your own.
Actions are basically a one click way of creating an effect or changing an image in a way that would usually take you numerous clicks. So, if you want to make an image look “punchy”, instead of going to your curves and creating an S curve to up your contrast, then heading to your saturation and upping it, you find an action that does this all in one click. This is especially useful when it comes to the things that you find yourself continuously doing to your images, such as adding a vignette, changing them to sepia, desaturating, sharpening them, resizing etc. There are thousands of ready- made actions online and if you are interested in buying some a simple search will lead you to numerous sites offering them.
I was recently taught how to create my own Photoshop actions and am really excited by the potential this offers me, and so I thought I would recreate the lesson for others who may share this excitement.
So let’s get to the lesson….
The first thing you need to do is enable actions in your Photoshop window, so head to “window”, and click “actions”.
Now go to your side bar and you should see that you have a panel for actions. I generally like to keep my actions in button mode, which is simple to navigate, but for this you will need your actions to be off button mode, so go to your side bar and uncheck button mode.
Open up any image and let’s make an action….
Before creating your first action you will need to create a folder or “set” in which you can save all the actions you create from here on. At the bottom of your actions panel you will find a button that allows you to “create new set”. I have creatively named the location where I save my actions – own actions.
Now to create the action, go to the bottom of your actions panel again and click ”create new action”.
A window will pop up and ask you for a name of your action, for this lesson I have decided to create a basic action that will make my images more “punchy”. To do this I am simply going to create an S curve to up the contrast and then up the vibrance. So dipping into my stores of unused imagination again, I am calling this action “Curves and Vibrance”. The window also asks you to choose; a set to put the action in (I obviously chose “own actions”), a function key or fast key (which allows you to run that action any time you press that key, I chose to make mine shift F10), and a colour- which makes the action easy to find in button mode- (I have made all my “own actions” violet).
When you are done, press the record button, and from now on everything you do will be recorded as part of the action you are creating. You should see a button at the bottom of your actions panel go red to indicate that it is recording.
The first thing I want my action to do is to create a new layer and name it “curves”.
I then want to create an S curve. For those of you who don’t know how to do this, you go to “image” ,”adjustments”, “ curves” and then you create an S curve as below, this effectively darkens your shadows and brightens your highlights thereby increasing the overall contrast in your image.
Between each step I like to create a new layer which enables me to adjust the effect of the action once I have run it by playing with the opacity of that layer, so I now duplicate the layer again and this time name it curves and vibrance.
Next step is to up the vibrance of my image. Again for those of you who do not know how to do this you go to “image”, “adjustments” and “vibrance”, and simply move the vibrance slider until it is where you would like it.
Now that you have a “curves and vibrance” layer you can go to the layers panel and delete the curves layer for a tidier action.
We have now done everything we want to do, so, head to the bottom of your actions panel and click the stop button, the red record button turns off and you are finished. You can now switch your actions back to button mode and go look for you new action 🙂 .Without much effort I have managed to shave precious time off my editing process for future images that call for that small bit of extra “punch”.
This is obviously a really basic example of an action and how to create one, but they can get very complicated and exciting completely changing the look and feel of an image all in one easy click.
The World in Thirds 