Understanding Adobe Photoshop: Digital Imaging Concepts and Techniques

15. Actions and Automation

While Photoshop is an extremely efficient program, you're truly missing out if you don't learn how to harness actions and automation. Photoshop has three categories of technology that can streamline your workflow and save you hours of work per week. These powerful commands can take the most repetitive tasks and automate them completely:

• Actions record a series of commands for playback on future images. They can be used to generate extremely complex results. You can also use batch processing to run an action on an entire folder of images.

• Automate commands perform complex production tasks (like thumbnail sheets or Internet galleries) with minimal effort.

• Scripts can perform tasks that are more complex than actions. Scripts were unveiled with Photoshop CS and have made a strong impact on complex workflow issues.

Tip: Actions as F-keys

Actions can be assigned to F-keys for easy access. Just double-click to the right of an action's name and pick an F-key. You can also add modifier keys to extend the number of F-keys.