Creating Actions in Photoshop

[Doug Nelson]

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[DannyRaphael]

Overall a very good tutorial... one of the best I've seen. The screen and menu snapshots are especially well done. I'll be including a link to this tutorial in the Actions FAQ I'm developing, which will be more focused on a "practical advice and trouble-shooting" than a general primer like this tutorial. They will compliment each other nicely.

RE: Your Actions folder should be located in your Photoshop program directory under \Presets\Photoshop Actions
If one chooses this practice, for actions created yourself and/or downloaded from the net I would highly recommend a second copy of located somewhere outside of the \adobe\photoshop... folder structure.

Why?

If Photoshop is ever deinstalled and reinstalled (has been known to happen... ask Phyllis), the actions inside

. \Presets\Photoshop Actions

will be deleted (during deinstall) and replaced (on reinstall) with the default Photoshop actions. No problem if you don't create, modify and/or download actions. Big problem if you do and and forget to move them out of harm's way.

- - - - -

David:

Why don't you post a link to your tutorial in the Actions thread in Jak's forum. I'm going to post a couple links to it in the Photo-art forum.

Thanks for doing this. Really nice job.

~Danny~

[d_kendal]

Thank you Danny! I was trying to just give people a good general idea of how to use photoshop actions regardless of how much PS experience they have.
Good tip, I hadn't realized that and I might have gotten cought next time I did a complete reload, so thanks.
partly I just worded that badly, I should have said something like:

• Your Actions folder is located in your Photoshop program directory under .\Presets\Photoshop Actions.
  WARNING! you can store your downloaded and created actions in this folder if you want, but if you are going to reload Photoshop, make sure that you have all of them backed up in a seperate folder (or put them there in the first place) otherwise they will be overwritten with the default Photoshop actions when it is reloaded.

Doug, could you replace that in the tut if you have the time? somebody might miss it if it was only in the thread here. thanks!

Danny, good idea I'll put up a post there after I'm done this one.

- David

[GOLDCOIN]

David.....

Your tutorial was exceptional, clear and easy to follow. Thank you for all your hard work & time..... It is appreciated.

[d_kendal]

hey Goldcoin,

glad you like it!

- David

[angue]

David,
Thank you for a great tutorial.
I always keep every action and brushes that I downloaded from the 'net or anything that I made myself away from the Photoshop folder. That way, if and when I need to reinstall the program, they won't get lost. The trick is to keep it in one place and remember where I placed them.

Tony

[collinf]

David

Many thanks, I was just starting to look at this for some of the "basic" tasks, such as my borders, and couldn't quite figure it out.

Thanks again

Collin

[d_kendal]

Tony and Collin,

No problem, glad you're finding it helpful.

Tony - the way I've done it now is created a new folder in my Photoshop directory called "Downloads" where I'm now keeping all my actions and downloaded filters saved so I can find them easily and don't lose them.

- David

[Paul]

David, good work on the tutorial, I presume that's you in the actionxchange site?

Sláinte
Paul

[d_kendal]

thanks, are you talking about this here? if so, yup thats me

- David

[Ed_L]

Hey David, I thought I replied to this tutorial before. Oh well --- Great job on an easily understood tutorial. I do have a question though. I saved an action as a text file, some time ago, and I'm trying to save another as a text file. When I save the action, using ctrl./alt, it does save it with the name I give it. But the text it saves, is one that is already saved. Any ideas on this? The action was saved as a new set. I'm baffled!

Ed

[d_kendal]

hmm, sounds strange, I'll have to do some experimenting to try and figure out what's happening since I haven't done much with it yet (haven't had much time lately) but I'll post a workaround as soon as I can figure it out (IF I figure it out that is...)

- David

[d_kendal]

Aha! I think I found what's happening, did you scroll down all the way to the bottom of the text file? I never realized it before, but when you save an action as a text file, it saves the information you were intending to save at the bottom of the file, under all the other text files of actions you've saved before. I'm really not sure why it defaults to doing it that way, does anybody else know how to stop it from doing that? hopefully that sort of solves your problem Ed!

- David

[Ed_L]

Thanks David. That's too easy. I'll give it a try.

Ed

[Ed_L]

You're a whiz David! It works great. I just copied that part of the file to a Word document. Worked well. Thanks again.

Ed

[d_kendal]

good to hear that it worked, Ed! too bad I can't figure out any way from stopping it from doing that in the first place though..

- David

[Doug Nelson]

If you have a technique you use often involving lots of layers, filters, blending modes, etc. it can make things a lot easier for you in the future by automating it all. [details]