Lessons

Lesson Info

Creating and Using Actions

Now let's let's talk about making actions and droplets a little bit okay? And you know, this is this is something that I threw in because it's usually what what people really want to know actions are awesome this can start to get into a little bit more advanced photoshopped depending on what you're doing and I have some examples um at the end of this towards the end of the production section will show you some were advanced actions that I really like to use but just to make some simple actions let's just make a simple action I'll just put into my default action folder so in your actions palate you have different folders of actions, okay? And then inside those folders you have various actions that's what this is these are all actions these are all just default actions that coming photo shop and then you can open up the guts of an action to look inside of it to actually see what it's doing so in this sea let's look at here I have, uh my one of my actions in here called a color proof whic...

h we're going to show you'll see it inside the color proof the first thing it does is it's flattens the image then it adds portraiture which is an awesome plugin from imagine gnomic that's image gnomic dot com portraiture awesome I love it then I can go through and it sets the background and you can even look and see if you open up each individual step. What is that which is actually happening? So action our actions are actually a great way to learn photoshopped. You know, if you play in action and does something awesome to your image and you like that is so cool. I have no idea what happened. Open up the action and you can look at, you know, its innermost, deepest parts and see exactly what happened in the exact levels and adjustments that were made. That's what? Actually, one of the ways that I learned photo shop is by dissecting actions. So what we're gonna do is make one right now here's my image and let's just say I want to make a black and white action. Okay, something simple I'm gonna go up to my actions palate and go to new action. Alright? And I'll just call it simple black and white and name it there. This is the set, it's just going to be in my default actions. I'm gonna hit record as soon as you hit record. I understand that everything that you do in photo shop is being recorded, so now you have to be careful, um, different ways to apply black and whites let's just go up and we'll just do a grayscale for now. I don't know. Let's. Just go to de saturate image adjustments. De saturate is going to give me a black and white. Okay, and let's, make let's throw curves adjustment in there, just toe pump it up a little bit. So if I do command and I get my curves and we'll just pop it up a little bit with a little s curve like that, and I'll hit, okay? And then I have to remember to hit stop in my actions, palate and that's something that I forgot to do a couple times. And then you have this gigantic action because it records everything you do later on. So I hit stop. Now I have a simple black and white action and that's all it is just a couple steps. But now, if I want to apply that to a bunch of other images let's, say, open up this image and I was like, I want to be that black and white action I just hit playing my hand in the van. It goes to d saturate and gives it a little curse pop that actually that's a decent little black and white action. Now, let's say, I want to apply that or be able to apply that at at anytime to any amount of images that I want ever I'm now going to create a droplet for that and place that droplet on my desktop that's where I keep my droplets and I only have a few of them there, but they're droplets that use all the time a drop it is a pointer to an action. Okay, so I'm gonna highlight that action. I'm gonna go to file, automate, create droplets. This dialog box comes up asked me where I want to save it and what I want to call it I'm gonna call it simple black and white and I'm gonna save it on my desktop. I'm gonna hit safe, okay? And this is conferring exactly what my action is that I'm doing the destination. I'm not gonna mess with that that's. If you want the images to go somewhere after they're done running the action I had, okay? And now on my desktop, you'll see simple black and white dropped that shows up. That means if I take these three images or thirty images or three hundred images and dragging on that droplet, they all opened up in photo shop and the action is applied to all of them. Okay, now I might look at something like this image in and be unhappy with that, because maybe it's too hot here, okay, I just I can go in my history, or I could close out of it or whatever, it's not like it saved its nothing's been nothing's permanent or whatever, you can set it up so that it is. But when you do that, I recommend doing it this way. First thing I'm going to do and this is going to get into some action manipulation for a little bit. I'm now going to copy this action into a different set by holding down option and just pulling it in any set at random and it's going to be called simple black and white copy. Okay, there it is, right there. Now I'm going to add a couple steps to this action. I'm gonna add a save as step to this action. Okay, so now let's say I wanted to have a bunch of images that turn black, they open out, they turn black and white and they get saved to a separate folder so that they're all ready to go and that's where I can actually leave and have lunch and come back and they're all done in this extra separate folder over here. I'm just going to add some steps to that, okay, so first play the action. And then I'm going to click the last step and then hit record again so this is the point here is that you can manipulate actions and add steps takeaway steps you know copy things from one action to another there's all kinds of ways that you can manipulate actions after the fact that's why I like him there really customizable um now I have record hit I'm going to go to file save has and I have a folder on my desktop it's called resized and it's where all my action saving as goto like every every one of these folders in here is a destination from an action that saving okay, so if I hit new folder I could just put simple black and white in here and I'm going to save us a j peg level ten j peg and then I'm gonna close and these are all being recorded in the action. Okay, so now every time and that's gonna show up in this folder on your simple black and white there's the image it's all saying I'm gonna delete that because I can take now several images and open him up let's just do three and open him up and I can run a batch on all those images file automate batch open files that's my source I can have a source could be a folder I can import or my source could be anything that's open and this is my action I'm gonna play I'm gonna hit okay? My destination is none because it's built into the action I hit okay and they're all gonna disappear I can do that toa five hundred images if I want to mention the beautiful thing about automating things like that is especially as we downsized our business waken have employees who do not have photoshopped knowledge do photo shop that could be the ones prepping the images if you have a system where it's real simple and they could just follow click this autumn a batch our proof action you know this gets him running for the sale they know where they save in a certain folder they really don't need to have a lot of knowledge a photo shop to prepped images so so I'm changing this action now to simple black and white saving close that's the name of that one and I'm gonna actually put it back in that same that same other folder underneath the other one so now I have two actions that are created one of them is just a simple black and white one of them's a simple black and white saving closed and I can create a droplet for that too so if I highlight that and go to file, automate and create droplet same thing simple black and white but I'm gonna call it save and close on my desktop hit. Okay, now I have two droplets ones just the simple black and white. And they're gonna be remained there gonna remain open and photo shop so I can continue to edit him afterwards. But if I have a bunch of images and I just want to throw, you know, some sort of effect, come in and they leave and then come back and have it be done, you get it, grab a water or whatever and have it be done. I can set this up, or if I have employees and I'm just like, this is part of our workflow. This is the black and white that I want you applied on these images. This is the brown tone that I want applied on these images. You can set this up on a work station, and they don't even need to know, like mickey said, virtually anything about photoshopped, they need to know how to highlight images or pick certain images, drag him up to a droplet and let him go. All right, then thrown one another workstation having do data entry or something. You know why this computer is doing all the work over here, right? Or, you know, for you guys that you know, for anyone that's doing it all by themselves, a home set up these processes and have your computer do the work for you it you know, seven o'clock at night rather than two o'clock in the morning and go hang out with your family or go to sleep. Wake up the next day and it's done but the point is knowing that you could do this knowing that you can create these actions that you can create these droplets that you can have you can integrate this into a system that you create in your post production part of your workflow this is the type of stuff really can maximize your computers, processing power rather than your brain's processing power you know here's your brain for other stuff like family time for fun time see a movie or something other than sitting in front of your computer and getting like stressed out and fried for the next day we have to get up and go through it and shoot all day again, you know? All right, so let's go into the next part retouching retouching same thing we try to automate me touching as much as we can and that's using portraiture like I was talking about earlier. This is a tiff it's, a completely lossless, high rez file right out of camera. Nothing has been changed on this, okay, so I'm gonna open this up and we have a proof action actually several proof actions that we can use and again it's also worth noting that you khun do some of the stuff in my room too with presets and sinking things it just depends on what you like to dio I like photoshopped a little bit more for certain things because I can do a little bit more with it give me a little bit uh I have some abilities and photoshopped that I don't have online but for simple basic stuff sure presets worked great in light room um sinking color corrections or color adjustments toe a bunch of images work great in light room you don't I mean you don't have to make making a black and white action and turning it into drop what isn't a really big deal? I just did that to show you that you know it's easy to do, but I'll show you like bigger, more extensive actions later but just know that it could be done and if you're doing if anything's redundant in your process, just think to yourself this I should be able to automate this from doing the same thing over and over again it's busy work I should be able to automate this there's probably a way that I can automate this that's the way that your brain can be thinking and then you can incorporate that into your into your workflow system on the back and just say that what you're going to show this is what I told you guys about yesterday our fruit action that saved us an entire employee's salary and you'll see in a second why and that's why we wanted to wring image just of a face because obviously on pets you don't need a cz much retouching obviously owner with a pet you d'oh but you'll just see why this quickly automates and this is the way they proved my proof actions set there's nine different actions and there the first three or just re sizing actions you know? So I would want this resized and I would typically do this out of light room as well, but just in case you don't have light room or aren't familiar with white room, I just have actions that resize this right down to my projector resolution so that goes from really high rez down to like what I was talking about earlier I don't need to show my client of thirty mega file I can show them uh seven hundred k five okay or a to meg file in this case um it makes a big difference especially if you run if you're just doing the same thing on one hundred images or a thousand images it's going to save you a lot of time so I've already resized that down now I'm goingto have these options I have color proof with avignon further proof without a vineyard, black and white proof with and without brown tone proof with and without because brown tones for us or big sellers. It's kind of one of our signature looks it's brown tone that we've created and really perfected in in our photo shop actions. And it's just kind of I don't know it's it's a big seller people really liked that look for us, okay? So I'm going to do color proof with the vigna as soon as I play this action and I'll open it so you can kind of see what's going on over here. I'm gonna play this action on this girl and this is pre touched, okay? I didn't do anything to the image, all right and let's say that this occurred, teo twenty images, thirty images, four hundred images I don't care, but I walked away from my computer and I came back and this is what it looked like before, and this is what it looked like after you can see that it's soft, but her eyes weren't touched, her eyes weren't affected, her teeth weren't affected, its a little defused and you can adjust the amount of the fusion within portraiture, you know, it doesn't have to be so strong, but for a senior girl, it works really well, you know, um so you can have different versions, you can have, like, a stronger or lesser less real estate and have two or three different versions of these as well. But the point is this is pre touched, and I can have an employee sit there and run this action on one hundred images that they're getting ready for the client or fifty images that are getting ready to come in, and I don't have to do anything except that button, okay? And then put the images in the folder that's ready for the sale. All right. Um now, that's, not if the client order is this. I'm going to go back to the original file, a run in action to kind of get me back to square one where I'm out here, probably without the vineyard, because I've customized then yet in that case, but everything else will be the same. You know, the color will be the same. The pre touching will be the same. Because if you go in and zoom and you can still see that there's, some slight blemish is here that I can go in and retouch but it's a big difference, considering all I did was hit a button, you know, and that's gonna be ready for the climb. Can't you see they're going to come in? And they're not going to be there, not going to be like too concerned about it. They're just going to know that they look really, really nice on that big screen or that monitor. Or however you self right.