From the course: Photoshop CC 2017 One-on-One: Mastery

Introducing the Actions panel - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop CC 2017 One-on-One: Mastery

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Introducing the Actions panel

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- [Instructor] In this movie I'll introduce you to the actions panel and I'll also show you how to create a new action inside an action set. To get to the actions panel go up to the window menu and choose the actions command, which has a default shortcut of F9. Now by default the actions panel is grouped along with the history panel. Which makes a fair amount of sense given that both panels track operations that you apply inside Photoshop. The big difference, of course, is that the actions panel allows you to record those operations and play them back later. Now if this is the first time you've opened this panel you'll see this action set right here called Default Actions. Action sets look like folders inside Photoshop that you can twirl close and back open. The items listed here inside the set are the actions themselves. Now they're a pretty motley group and none of them are anything I consider to be remotely useful. But just in case you want to try them out any action that includes the word selection inside parentheses requires you to select some portion of the image in advance. If you see the word type, that tells you that the action is designed specifically to work with a type layer. And so by way of example here, I'm looking at a photograph from the Dreamstime image library about which you can learn more and get deals at dreamstime.com/deke.php And so lets say I go ahead and get rid of this URL layer just by pressing the backspace key or the delete key on the Mac. And then I turn on this layer of live editable type and I go ahead and select it as well. Now I should say this type layer is formatted with a font that might not be installed on your system, but if you're following along with me that's not a problem because Photoshop goes ahead and saves the pixels associated with any given type layer. And notice this layer also includes a few layer effects. Alright, I'm going to go ahead and select this water reflection type action and then to play this action back you want to click on the play button. But before you do it's always a good idea to save your changes inside Photoshop. And that's because playing back an action can lead to unexpected events. Now in my case they do of course have some unsaved changes. After all I got rid of that shape layer and I turned on a type layer. So it would generally be a good idea to go up to the File menu and choose the Save command before I apply the action. But for the sake of demonstration I'm not going to do that. Let's just go ahead and select the action and click on the play button, and a moment later Photoshop creates this ripply reflection against the real photographic water. Now the effect looks okay I suppose but we do have some problems here. Notice that Photoshop has rasterized my editable type layer so I don't have access to that anymore even though all of the dynamic layer effects have survived. And that's because all the actions that ship along with Photoshop were created a long long time ago back when actions were first introduced to the software. And back in those days Photoshop had to rasterize text before it could apply any filters. Which means if I want to restore my editable text I either have to go up to the File menu and choose the Revert command or I could switch back over to the History panel and I could click on the Snapshot item and that's because this particular action goes ahead and creates a snapshot as its very first step. And the moment I do you can see that I've restored my editable type. Alright now these aren't the only default actions that are available to you. You can access a bunch more by clicking on the flyout menu icon and then choosing one of these options down here. And you can try out these actions if you want. Commands is just going to play back single commands as if you want to create custom keyboard shortcuts, while these other sets generally include multi-step actions. But if my experience is any indication you're much better off creating more practical actions of your own. Now the one command I do want to draw your attention to is this guy all the way up here at the top, Button Mode. And if you choose that command you'll see each one of the default actions represented by a colorful button. And I'll show you how you assign those colors in just a moment. But first I'm just going to go ahead and zoom out here so I can take in the photographic image, and I'll go ahead and click on this guy right here Sepia Tone layer, and the word layer tells us that Photoshop is going to apply this effect to an independent layer. So I'll go ahead and click on the button and Photoshop applies the action automatically. Now while the button mode could be great for playing back actions, that's all it can do. If you want to record actions, then you need to turn the button mode off so that you can access the standard action interface that we're seeing here. Now I'm going to switch back to the History panel and click on Snapshot two in order to restore the full color image. And then I'll return to the Actions panel, I'll select that Default Actions folder, and I'll drop down to the trash icon, and instead of clicking on it I'll press the ALT key or the option key and click in order to bypass any warning. That's how much I don't care for those actions. I suggest you do the same thing as well. And while that may seem like a pretty extreme move, bear in mind that you can always bring those actions back by going to the flyout menu once again and choosing Reset Actions. Instead, what we're going to do is create a new action. Now you can create a new action if you'd like by clicking on this little page icon. But if you do, you'll create your new action inside of a set that's automatically named Set 1. Which my guess is not what you want to do. So I'll just go ahead and press Ctrl Z, or command Z on the Mac, to undo that action. And I'll start by creating a new set which you can do by clicking on this little folder icon once again located down here at the bottom of the actions panel. And I'll name this guy output actions because we will be creating a number of actions designed to prepare our images for output, and then I'll click OK. And next I'll click on the little page icon to create a new action. And I'm going to call this guy sharpen for output and we'll see why in the next movie. And then I'll make sure the set item reads output actions. You can assign your action a color, incidentally, but this color's only going to show up in the button mode. So just bear that in mind. I'm going to leave mine set to none. You can also assign a keyboard shortcut to your action, and that shortcut needs to involve a function key. And you can select from F2 to F12 here on the PC. On the Mac you can select from F1 all the way up to F19. Now bear in mind if you loaded D keys, I've assigned some of the function keys to opening panels and applying filters. So if you assigned on of the function keys that I've already assigned in advance then your action will have priority. So actions always have priority over keyboard shortcuts here inside Photoshop. Also notice that you can add a modifier key in the form of the control and shift keys here on the PC. That would be the command and shift keys on the Mac. I'm not going to assign a function key however because it's pretty easy to play back actions without one as we'll see later. And so I'll begin my action by clicking the record button. After which point you can apply a sequence of operations that the actions panel will record. And you'll see that the action is being recorded by the appearance of this red record button. Now if you want to stop recording at any point in time then just go ahead and click on the square stop button or you can just press the escape key at which point the record button will turn white to show you that the action is no longer being recorded. And that friends is how you create a new action inside of an action set. In the next movie, we will begin recording some actual operations.

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