Save Time With Macros in Photoshop cs3
Have you ever found yourself repeating the same task again and again in Photoshop and wished you had the programming knowledge to automate it? Then I have good news for you, Photoshop will do it for you, and there’s no need to learn any coding skills or new complicated information, if you can record a Dr Who on your Tivo, or whatever you happen to use to record Dr Who on, you can do this. This is even available to those who don’t watch Dr Who and it works in all versions of Photoshop from CS3 upwards.
This process works with any set of actions, but let’s pick something simple as an example ñ resizing an image and altering it’s colour attributes. Let’s imagine you have a large number of colour photos and from them you want to create a series of thumbnails in black and white.
First open your file, then open the Actions menu. (Window/Actions or choose the Play button on the right hand sidebar)
This will list all the current Actions saved in your version of Photoshop. It already has several useful one in there, but we’re going to concentrate on creating a bespoke one. Don’t be afraid of this menu, actions are simply a series of steps that Photoshop carries out in one go. You record what you do to one image, and then with one click you can do all the same things to another image, or a series of images.
Choose Create New Action, the New Action window will pop up and we can name our new action, let’s call this one BW Thumbnail. Then press the Record button in the same window. Whatever we do next, Photoshop will remember every step.
So resize your image (Image, Image Size, change the Width to 300 pixels)Now make the image Black and White (Image, Adjustments, Black and White)Save the image in your ìThumbnailsî folder (File, Save as, choose JPG, choose Thumbnails folder)Close the file.
Now press the Stop Recording button on your Actions menu. Note the importance of saving and closing your file, it will save a lot of time if you are applying this action to a large number of files.
Open another image. Select the BW Thumbnail action from the Actions menu, Photoshop will now resize your image, make it Black and White, save a copy of this image as a JPG and close the file, all in one click. If that worked, then try doing it to a large number of files at once, choose File, Automate, Batch, Select the BW Thumbnail macro (Photoshop will automatically select the most recent Action so it will probably already be pre-selected) and choose a folder that contains several images. Press OK. Photoshop will now open each file within that folder in turn, alter it’s size, convert it to Black and White, save it as a JPG in your Thumbnails folder, close the file and open the next one and repeat. All in one click.
You have now created a simple macro using Photoshop Actions, experiment with different combinations of actions, you can record any set of actions and save them for later, try some more complex sets of actions and see what you can achieve.
This process works with any set of actions, but let’s pick something simple as an example ñ resizing an image and altering it’s colour attributes. Let’s imagine you have a large number of colour photos and from them you want to create a series of thumbnails in black and white.
First open your file, then open the Actions menu. (Window/Actions or choose the Play button on the right hand sidebar)
This will list all the current Actions saved in your version of Photoshop. It already has several useful one in there, but we’re going to concentrate on creating a bespoke one. Don’t be afraid of this menu, actions are simply a series of steps that Photoshop carries out in one go. You record what you do to one image, and then with one click you can do all the same things to another image, or a series of images.
Choose Create New Action, the New Action window will pop up and we can name our new action, let’s call this one BW Thumbnail. Then press the Record button in the same window. Whatever we do next, Photoshop will remember every step.
So resize your image (Image, Image Size, change the Width to 300 pixels)Now make the image Black and White (Image, Adjustments, Black and White)Save the image in your ìThumbnailsî folder (File, Save as, choose JPG, choose Thumbnails folder)Close the file.
Now press the Stop Recording button on your Actions menu. Note the importance of saving and closing your file, it will save a lot of time if you are applying this action to a large number of files.
Open another image. Select the BW Thumbnail action from the Actions menu, Photoshop will now resize your image, make it Black and White, save a copy of this image as a JPG and close the file, all in one click. If that worked, then try doing it to a large number of files at once, choose File, Automate, Batch, Select the BW Thumbnail macro (Photoshop will automatically select the most recent Action so it will probably already be pre-selected) and choose a folder that contains several images. Press OK. Photoshop will now open each file within that folder in turn, alter it’s size, convert it to Black and White, save it as a JPG in your Thumbnails folder, close the file and open the next one and repeat. All in one click.
You have now created a simple macro using Photoshop Actions, experiment with different combinations of actions, you can record any set of actions and save them for later, try some more complex sets of actions and see what you can achieve.
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