12 Beginner Tutorials for

Getting Started With Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop, the ubiquitous and industry standard graphics
software for photographers, designers, digital artists, as well as
casual enthusiasts, can be a baffling application to understand the
first time you fire it up. Luckily, littered across the vast space of the
web are tutorials in all shapes and sizes that will help you get up and
running in no time.
In this post, I've pieced together 12 excellent Photoshop tutorials
geared toward beginners. If you're a complete novice or a casual
user of this software, you've stopped by the right place.
Because this is specifically for beginners — and because
Photoshop's robust set of features is near-bottomless — I've skipped
intermediate and advanced topics such as drawing with the Pen tool
and working with 3D effects.
If you have tips for aspiring Photoshoppers, share them in the
comments below.

1. Getting Started with Photoshop

This tutorial, will guide you through the Photoshop fundamentals and
the basic tools available at your disposal. It's an excellent jump-off
point that will give you an understanding of what you're up against.
The tutorial starts with a bird's-eye view of Photoshop's workspace to
get the reader familiarized with the lay of the land. Then it goes on to
cover essential concepts such as saving files (and the various
popular formats for the web), an introduction to shortcuts that all
Photoshoppers should know, how to choose colors, and much more.

It doesn’t matter if you are new to the world of graphic design, or you
are a photographer and you want to enhance your photos, you will
eventually encounter the need to use Adobe Photoshop.
Remembering when I first started out, I recall how intimidated I was
at all of the menus and features available. I wondered how I would
ever begin to know how to work my way through Photoshop and
create professional quality, eye-dazzling work. Years later, I use
Photoshop on a daily basis, and my actions are more like reflexes
and I can complete most tasks without a second thought. I won’t lie
to you. You won’t be able to go from getting started, to pro overnight,
but you can take comfort in knowing that everyone has to start
somewhere.

Getting to Know Your Way Around Photoshop

It is good to have a general idea of where everything is, so that you
can work your way around the Photoshop interface. To get started, I
will list some terminology, and where you can find it in Photoshop.
1. Main Menu
This is where your Options, Image Adjustments and Filters are.
When you run filters in Photoshop, they will be found in this section
under the Filters Menu.
2. Options Bar
This menu is most used when you have a tool selected. It allows you
to adjust settings that are specified for the active tool.

2. Toolbox
By default, this sits on the left side of your screen and contains all of
the different tools that are available in the program. If a tool contains
a black triangle in the bottom-right corner, then there are other tools
related to that one stored in a sub menu. All you have to do is click
and hold your mouse over that tool to reveal the submenu.
Terms That You May Hear When Learning
Photoshop
When learning Photoshop, you may be watching video tutorials,
reading a book, or reading a blog tutorial online about how to do
something in Photoshop. Most writers have an assumption that the
reader has a general idea of the basic terminology involved with
using Photoshop.

Panels
This refers to each window inside of Photoshop, which contains
controls over different aspects of your document. Good examples
would be the Color Panel, the Layers Panel, the Paths Panel, and
anything else besides the toolbox that is open alongside your actual
Photoshop document. What is great about Panels is that you can
arrange them however you desire. You can dock any panel with
another set of panels, so that you can consolidate your workspace.
This is especially handy for people who are working on a laptop or a
smaller monitor. All you have to do is click and drag the title tab of
any panel over another panel. The bottom panel will outline in blue,
letting you know that you can dock this panel with another set.
Release your mouse, and now you will have multiple panels in one
small window.
A good rule of thumb is to dock alike items. I tend to dock Swatches,
Color, Styles and Kuler together. Then, I dock Layers, Channels, and
Paths together. I also dock brushes and brush presets together, and
I dock the Character and Paragraph panels together.

Document Window
This is the actual image or file that you are working on in Photoshop.
This also refers to any other open document inside of Photoshop.
You can have multiple images open in Photoshop at once.
Dialog Box
This refers to a popup box that opens when you select choose to use
a filter, or certain options in Photoshop. Dialog boxes usually contain
options and settings for the filter or action that you just selected.

Get Comfortable With Your Surroundings

Adobe loves to make it easy to set things up how you like it. They
have integrated a feature called workspaces. Workspaces allow you
to set up your Photoshop panels how you like them. You can arrange
your workspace exactly how you like it and save it for later as a
preset.
Photoshop already comes with workspace presets that are geared
towards different professionals. The presets are Essentials, Design,
Painting, Photography, 3D, Motion, and New in CS5. You can save
your own presets easily. Simply arrange your panels and workspace
exactly how you’d like it. You can close certain panels that you don’t
use frequently, and if there are panels that you want to be active, but
you don’t see them, you can make them visible quickly. Simply go to
Window> and then select the panel that you want to make visible.
Once you have everything how you like it, click the double arrow
next to your list of workspaces, and select New Workspace.

A dialog box will pop up, allow you to name your workspace so that
you can activate it later. You will also have the option to remember
your keyboard shortcuts and your menu setup as well. This enables
you to have the ultimate flexibility you need, and you can switch
workspaces with a simple click of a button. This speeds up your
workflow, and saves you time, because you aren’t constantly
opening and closing panels, moving them, rearranging them, etc.

New Documents
Simply go to File> New to open a blank document. A dialog box will
come up with several options. You can choose a custom file size,
resolution and the color mode for your document. If you are brand
new to the world of Photoshop, then you will want to know what
these are, and what they mean.
Width and Height
The width and height of your document are important. You can select
whether you work in inches, pixels, centimeters, millimeters, points,
picas or columns. A pixel is the smallest block of color information
that makes up an image. You would most likely choose pixels if you
are designing for the web, because dimensions are set in pixels.
Inches will be useful in print design, because you are referring to the
physical size of the document.
Centimeters, millimeters, points, and picas are also used for print,
but aren’t as widely used anymore.

Resolution
The resolution of your document is as equally important as the size.
Work that you do for the web is usually done in 72ppi or pixels per
inch. This is the resolution in which most monitors display their
images. If you are designing your work for print purposes, such as
commercial photography, or anything that you want to print, such as
photos, business cards, flyers, and brochures, then you will want to
choose 300ppi. This is denser and gives a sharper image.
Color Mode
Your color mode is important, because just as in resolution, your
color mode will depend on your intended outcome. The most
commonly used color modes are RGB and CMYK. Lab Color, Bitmap
and Grayscale are the other options for color modes. LAB mode is
used for a lot of professional color correction, and you can do some
things in this color mode that are harder to do in other modes. This is
usually for more advanced users that understand Photoshop well
already, because LAB color mode is a completely different animal.

RGB
RGB Color Mode is made up of 3 color channels- red, green and
blue. RGB is mainly used for web design and for screen or monitor
purposes. Monitor colors are made up of red, green and blue light in
order to display images, so RGB mode is most suitable and true-to-
life to work with. It is good to keep in mind that all monitors are
different though. One monitor may display blue slightly different than
the next monitor, and both of those could be different than the next in
line.

CMYK
CMYK mode is used mainly for print. CMYK stands for Cyan,
Magenta, Yellow and Black. These are the colors of ink that make up
an image in most conventional printers. You will find it interesting that
the different combinations of Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow will make
red, green and blue. When designing in Photoshop, it is important to
keep in mind that an image in CMYK mode won’t look exactly the
same printed as they do on a monitor. Designers have been battling
this issue for years. There are color calibration tools that high-end
professionals use, but it is still a good idea to use something called a
proof.
A proof is a printed sample of the image or design that you want to
have printed. You compare this to your intended work on the monitor,
and you make adjustments to your design based on the outcome of
the proof. Your design may look perfect on your computer, but when
it is printed, it is more yellow than it is supposed to be. Before the
final print is approved, you would adjust your colors to compensate
for the extra yellow, and you might even order a second proof.
Some printers charge for hard copy proofs of your work, which some
might argue isn’t worth the extra expense. It really depends on your
project, because you might order 10,000 copies, and if they are all
ruined, then you have to absorb the costs, or you could spend the
extra $10 and be on the safe side.

New document Presets

Other than resolution and color modes, Photoshop makes life easier,
and incorporates document presets, so you don’t have to remember
dimensions for all of your documents. A good example would be if
you make a lot of mockups of tablet screens, and you didn’t want to
have to remember the dimensions of an ipad screen, a Samsung
Galaxy, an ipod touch, and a dozen other devices. You could dial in
the dimensions once, and save them as a preset. Photoshop already
incorporates some presets out of the box, such as paper sizes, and
normal web site sizes.
 Layers
One of the most important aspects of Photoshop is the feature called
Layers. Layers is where you can stack images on top of each other,
blend images together, add color, take it away, merge layers together
and much more. In the example below, the document is made up of
3 layers: the black background layer, the middle texture layer set to
the blend mode of hard light and then the type layer on top. How
layers stack will greatly determine the look of your work.
Shortcuts
To make a new layer, hit Command/Ctrl +N to create a new layer.
Personally, I use the Layers Panel, and there are keys that you can
hit to save time and make life much easier. To create a new layer
below the active layer, hold down the command/ctrl key when you
click the new layer icon. You can create your own custom keyboard
shortcuts by going to Window> Workspace> Keyboard SHortcuts &
Menus.
Opacity
The opacity of a layer refers to how much you can see through it. 0%
opacity means you can see right through it. 50% opacity means that
it is 50% transparent. 100% opacity means that you can’t see
through it at all. To lower a specific layer’s opacity, simply type the
number of the opacity that you would like. For example, if you want
30% opacity for the selected layer, tap the 3 key. You can do this as
much as you’d like. You can make a layer have double-digit opacity,
by quickly tapping both numbers. For example, if you wanted a layer
to have an opacity of 45%, you would quickly tap 4-5. In the example
below, both circles are on their own layer and are set to 50% opacity.
To select multiple layers in order, hold shift and click the layers that
you would like. If you want to select specific layers, hold down
command/ctrl and click each layer. When multiple layers are
selected you can move the contents of all of those layers at once.
They are considered connected unless they are unselected.

A great way to organize your layers is to group them together. With

multiple layers selected, go to Layer> New> Group From Layers.
You can name this group anything you want, and all of those layers
will be in this folder. You can click the triangle next to the folder to
expand its contents. You can move a whole group of layers at once
by selecting the group layer with the folder icon. You can also link
layers by clicking the link icon at the bottom of the Layers Panel.
When layers are linked together, they will move together in unison.

You can stack layers upon layers on top of each other. Sometimes,
when you are done processing multiple layers, it might help to
consolidate them. This is called merging layers. You can do this by
selecting multiple layers and hitting the command/ctrl + the E key.
To duplicate a layer, hit command/ctrl+ J.

Tools
There are many tools at your disposal in Photoshop. I will cover
them from left to right and from top to bottom. Below is a chart to
follow along with.

1. The Marquee Tools

Rectangular – This makes a rectangular selection on your
Photoshop document. With any of the selection tools, you can hold
shift to add to your selection, and hold option/alt to subtract from the
selection. You can also feather your section, which blurs the
transition between the boundaries of your selection and the rest of
the image.
Elliptical – This allows you to make a round selection, and the same
rules for the rectangular marquee tool apply to the elliptical marquee
tool.
Single Row – This tool makes a 1px horizontal selection that spans
the total width of your document from left to right. This is great for
created a 1px repeating pattern for your websites.
Single Column – This tool makes a 1px vertical selection that spans
the total height of your document from left to right. This is great for
created a 1px repeating pattern for your websites.

2. The Move Tool

The move tool does just that. You can select anything on the current
layer and move it to a different position on the screen. If you have
made a selection, you can move the selection and it will cut it away
from the rest of the layer. You can also tell Photoshop to AutoSelect
Layers or groups, but this can be annoying when you are trying to
work.

3. The Lasso Tools

The Lasso Tool – This tool lets you make loose selections around
anything on a layer. It has the same options as the marquee tools.
The Polygonal Lasso Tool – This tool allows you to make selections,
but it does so in a strictly linear fashion. In other words, you can
draw straight lines for your selections.
The Magnetic Lasso Tool – This is a handy selection tool that allows
you to drag your mouse over the boundaries of an image, and it
determines where the edges are, and anchor points are placed at
regular intervals. This should give you a close and relatively
controlled selection.

4. The Quick Selection Tool

The Quick selection tool makes a selection based on the boundaries
of objects. As it is with the name, it makes quick work of making
selections, and you can simply drag over the areas that you want to
select.
Magic Wand Tool – The magic wand tool makes a selection based
on where you click your mouse. As with the other selection tools,
hold shift to add to the selection and hold option/alt to subtract from
your selection. The contiguous option decides if you want to select
only that spot, or if you want to select that color information over the
entire image.
5. The Crop Tool
The crop tool allows you to crop an image to the proportions that you
desire. You can input a set ratio, such as 3 x 5 in the ratio, or you
can also determine a fixed size and resolution for your cropped
image.
The Slice Tool – The Slice tool allows you to slice up your image or
graphic for use on the web. It is basically like the Crop tool, but for
use on the web. Once you have your graphics sliced up, you can
export them all at once for the web.
The Slice Select Tool – This allows you to select a specific slice and
edit its boundaries. This allows you to make proper adjustments
before you export your slices.

6. The Eyedropper Tool

The eyedropper tool allows you to sample a color from any image,
so that you can use it in your work. You can control the color area
that it samples, so that it samples a pinpoint pixel, or it can sample a
range of pixels. Also, you can sample the current layer or al layers.
The Color Sampler Tool – This allows you to sample up to 4 areas of
color within your image, so that you can have information about
those colors. Like the Eyedropper Tool, you can determine the range
of pixels that it samples.
The Ruler Tool – The Ruler tool will tell you the distance between
two points, but it can also help you straighten your photos.
The Note Tool – The Note Tool allows you to add notes to your
Photoshop document. This is great for collaboration, and really helps
to organize and streamline the workflow. You can export notes to a
pdf version of your file, which is handy for those people that are
involved in the project, but don’t have Photoshop.
The Count Tool – The Count Tool lets you place a visual marker on
objects in an image as you are counting them, which it keeps track
of. You can also have multiple count groups, which means that you
can keep track of several types of objects within the same image.

7. The Spot Healing Brush

The spot healing brush is a great tool for removing artifacts and
blemishes from images. It works with just a simple click of the mouse
by sampling the surrounding areas and blending the anomaly away.
If you set it to content aware, you can remove larger areas of
unwanted material.
The Healing Brush Tool – The healing brush allows you to brush out
blemishes and areas that aren’t desired in your images. You click the
option/alt key to select certain
The Patch Tool – The patch tool is a great tool where you can make
a selection that is similar to the lasso tool. Once the selection is
made, you can click and drag it to the area that you wish to fill it with
and when you release it, it patches it with the content that you have
specified.
The Red Eye Tool – The Red Eye Tool is a quick and easy tool that
allows you to click on portions of an image that have red eye and
remove them instantly. If there are any red portions outside of the
eye, it may cause adverse effects.

8. The Brush Tool

The Brush Tool is one of the most important tools that are in your
arsenal. You will probably use the brush tool more than any other
tool in Photoshop, especially if you are retouching images. You can
change the size of the brush, how hard it is, its shape, texture,
opacity, flow, how it acts when you use it, and more.
The Pencil Tool – The pencil tool allows you to draw on the
Photoshop canvas as if you were using a real pencil.
The Mixer Brush Tool – The Mixer Brush is an amazing tool that
allows you to simulate real media, such as paint, and blend colors
with realistic effects. It is a natural way to paint inside of Photoshop,
and with Photoshop CS5, there are many bristle brushes that are
available to simulate the behavior of traditional paint brushes.

9. The Clone Stamp Tool

The Clone Stamp Tool is used to clone or copy image information
from another area. Hold the option/alt key and click to sample an
area of an image. Then, click the image to brush with the color and
image information that you sampled.
The Pattern Stamp Tool – The pattern stamp tool gives you the
ability to use a brush-type tool to paint a pattern or texture on your
document.

10. The History Brush Tool

With this tool you can paint with an image state or a snapshot into a
different layer. This lets you bring in details from another project
state.
The Art History Brush Tool – This does the same as the History
brush, but adds a stylized effect with different settings and
parameters.

11. The Eraser Tool

The Eraser Tool removes pixel information from your document. It
allows you to remove content that you do not need. You use
brushes, which you can specify just like any other brush-related tool
in Photoshop. You can adjust the opacity and the hardness of the
brush.
The Background Eraser Tool – The Background Eraser Tool is a
great tool for removing the background from an image. Simply click
and drag the eraser along the boundaries of the image and its
background and it will remove the background. This isn’t a perfect
method of extraction, though and requires trial and error.
The Magic Eraser Tool – The magic eraser removes a section of the
background of an image, and is based on the area that you click to
remove. It does a good job, but sometimes it removes areas that
aren’t necessary, requiring a lot of trial and error.

12. The Gradient Tool

The gradient tool allows you to create a blend between two or more
colors. You can determine the angle of the blend, it’s opacity, how
many colors are blended and the order of the steps within the
gradient.
The Paint Bucket Tool – The paint bucket tool will fill an area with
color, depending on the tolerance setting. It will fill contiguously, or
you may set it to fill any area with that color range.

13. The Smudge Tool

The smudge tool works like a brush, but it smudges pixels and
allows you to push them around. It allows you to blend and transition
colors easily.
The Sharpen Tool – The sharpen tool gives you the ability to sharpen
areas of an image by painting on them manually. This gives you a lot
of control and pinpoint accuracy when sharpening images.
The Blur Tool – The blur tool lets you blur parts of an image, which
can help with harsh transitions between images. Like the sharpen
tool, it behaves like a brush and gives you pinpoint accuracy.

14. The Dodge Tool

The dodge tool lets you paint in highlights in the different tonal
ranges of your images.
The Burn Tool – The burn tool allows you to paint in shadows and
darken different tonal ranges in your images.
The Sponge Tool – The Sponge Tool allows you to add or take away
saturation from your images. You can use it like a brush and paint in
precise areas.

15. The Pen Tool

With the Pen Tool, you can draw paths for use in your artwork. Print
designers use the pen tool to draw paths around objects to use them
for projects. Many print design software such as Quark and InDesign
allow you to use clipping paths embedded from Photoshop so that
there are no background around your photos.
The Freeform Pen Tool – The freeform pen tool is a drawing tool that
lets you draw a path by hand and it adds anchor points along the
way. This is a natural way to draw a path by hand and would
probably benefit best from a user with a drawing tablet.
The Add Anchor Point Tool – This tool lets you add anchor points to
your paths by using this tool and clicking directly on the path itself.
The Delete Anchor Point Tool – This tool lets you delete anchor
points from your paths that you don’t need. This keeps your paths
clean and free from too many points.
The Convert Point Tool – This tool allows you to select a path and
convert it from a straight path to a round one, or from a round path to
a straight path.

16. The Text Tool (The Horizontal Type Tool)

This is the main tool for creating your type in Photoshop.
The Vertical Type Tool – The Vertical Type Tool lets you type
vertically instead of the traditional horizontal method.
The Horizontal Type Mask Tool and The Vertical Type Mask Tool-
These tools let you make a mask from a typeface, which can save
you a step or two if you know that you want rasterized type right off
the bat. If you want editable type made of a color or texture, you can
simply use a clipping path using normal text and it will work the
same, while still being editable.

17. The Path Selection Tool

The Path Selection Tool gives you the ability to select an entire path
at one time. This lets you move the entire path instead of just one
point.
The Direct Selection Tool – The Direct Selection Tool lets you select
one or more anchor points within a path, so that you can move them
or alter their arrangement.

18. The Shape Tools

These include the Rectangle, Rounded Rectangle, Ellipse, Polygon,
The Line Tool and The Custom Shape Tools. They allow you to draw
custom shapes based from paths or vector shape layers, giving you
crisp lines.

19. 3D Tools
The 3D tools inside of Photoshop let you manipulate objects in 3D
space.
20. Camera Tools
The camera tools allow you to alter the position of the camera view
when working with 3D. The allow you to pan, or rotate around the
scene.

21. The Hand Tool

The hand tool lets you move to any area of an image without
accidentally dragging around a layer of an object on a layer. You can
quickly switch to the hand tool any time just by holding the space
bar.
The Rotate View Tool – The Rotate view tool is really handy because
it allows you to rotate the entire canvas and leave it in any 360°
rotated position. To bring it back to normal view, simply click the
reset view button in the options bar.

22. The Zoom Tool

The Zoom Tool is used to zoom in and out of your document. It is
mostly used when someone wants to zoom in on a specific section
of an image. You can simply click and drag a selection of an image
and it will zoom in on that area.

Common Tasks
Masking
To make a mask, you have a few different options available to you.
Masks allow you to blend images, retouch images, blend effects, and
composite images into one convincing photo.
Quick Mask
A quick mask is really simple to make. Simply hit the Q key to bring
up quick mask mode, where you can use the brush tool to paint in
the areas that you want to make as your selection. The areas will be
shown in a transparent red color. When you are done, you can hit
the Q key again, and you will see that your quick mask is an active
selection. Simply click the Layer Mask icon in the Layers Panel to
turn your selection into a mask for that layer.
A True Layer Mask
Click the Layer Mask icon in the Layers Panel to create a new layer
mask. You will use the brush tool to paint in your mask. Black
conceals the image, to show the layer below and white reveals the
image to hide what is under it.
 Selections
You can create selections in several ways. One way is to use the
magic wand tool and click on an area of your image to make a
selection. You can add to the selection by holding shift when you
click on a new area, and by holding alt/option when you click on an
area, you can subtract from the selection.
The quick selection tool is a great tool, because it quickly selected
areas of your image when you click and drag over them. You can
quickly select people and objects. Just as the magic wand tool, you
can add to the selection by holding shift when you click on a new
area, and by holding alt/option when you click on an area, you can
subtract from the selection. You can use the marquee tools to make
selections. The rectangular marquee tool creates a rectangular or
square selection and the elliptical marquee tool creates an oval or
circular selection. You can make selections manually with the Lasso
Tool, the Polygonal Lasso Tool, and the Magnetic lasso tool. These
tools will allow you to make a custom selection that you specify your.
Once you make a selection with any of these tools, if you click
Refine Mask in the options bar at the top of Photoshop, you can
tweak your selection and one of the output options is New Layer with
a Layer Mask. This gives you a highly refined mask that you can
tweak for your own purposes.
 Conclusion
Getting started for the first time with Photoshop can seem daunting,
but learning the basics and learning your way around the program
can make things quick and easy. As with anything, practice makes
perfect, so with a little practice you should be used to the interface in
no time. Knowing what Photoshop will and won’t do ( There isn’t
much that Photoshop can’t do) will help you to edit your images and
create digital artwork quickly and efficiently.

2. Photoshop's Toolbox

If you're just starting out with Photoshop, you will no doubt be

spending plenty of your time using the Tools panel, which contains
various tools for working with type, painting, drawing, moving
objects, and so forth.
In this Photoshop tutorial, you will get a beginner's overview of the
various tools contained within the Tools panel. From the selection
tools to the retouching tools, you'll learn all about them and their
uses.
In this lesson, you’ll be introduced to Adobe Photoshop’s Toolbox ,
and a lot of the tools it has to offer. A solid understanding of the tools
showcased in this tutorial will lead to better comprehension of
Photoshop in general.
The toolbox in Photoshop is split up into 4 unique categories so that
finding the right tool is never a hassle. Those categories are:
1. Selection, Crop & Slice Tools
 2. Retouch & Paint Tools
3. Drawing & Type Tools (Vector Tools)
4. Annotations & Measurement Tools

In addition to these 4 sections a few other components make up the

toolbox, most notably, the Foreground and Background colors.
Now that you see how the tools are all organized, let’s take a look at
some of the most vital tools Photoshop has to offer. This is really just
a cursory glance of the toolbox, as we’d be crazy to go into detail for
EVERY SINGLE tool Photoshop has to offer in a single lesson, but
you ought to now have an understanding what some of the tools are
capable of. We’ll go over how to use many of these tools in later
lessons.

Selection Tools

The Marquee Tools are used for selecting objects such as

rectangles, squares, and ellipses.
The Move Tool is used to move selections, objects, and layers.
There are several Lasso Tools which are used to make irregular
selections. There is a polygonal lasso tool for polygon selections,
and a magnetic lasso tool which automatically follows edges of
objects.
The Magic Wand Tool selects an area of similar colors in a single
click (such as the white in the cloud logo ).

The Crop Tool allows users to redefine their active image area but
not resize the ENTIRE image. It’s sort of like cutting out a smaller
picture from a larger photo with a pair of scissors.

Retouch Tools

There are several healing tools in Photoshop which are used to

repair imperfections in images, or handle blemishes and red-eye.

With the Clone Stamp Tool , a user may select a source starting
point somewhere on an image, and then paint elsewhere using that
starting point as a reference, effectively cloning the source.

The Eraser Tool can be used to erase parts of an image, selection,

or layer.

The Sharpen Tool is used to sharpen edges in an image, while the

Blur Tool burs edges. The Smudge Tool smudges an image, similar
to using fingerpaint.
The Dodge Tool lightens parts of an image while the Burn Tool
darkens. The Sponge Tool is used to saturate, or desaturate parts
of an image.

Painting Tools

The Brush and Pencil tools are used to paint strokes in graphics.
These tools can be highly customized for very effective painting.

The Fill Tools are used to fill entire layers, selections and areas with
a solid color, or gradient.

Vector Drawing & Type Tools

The Type Tools are used for creating and setting type in an image.
Both vertical and horizontal type can be created.
The Pen Tools are used to create clear shapes and paths which can
be used as vector objects that can be scaled to any size.

Cutom Shapes are vector objects that can be created on the fly
from a list of presets (including user created shapes)
3. Photoshop For BeThis is the third of a series of tutorials thought
for Photoshop beginners. I’ll explain in depth those features that can
result difficult to understand for a newbie. In the previous two articles
I’ve explained how the pen tool works and some useful extracting
techniques .
Today I want to go one step backwards, and deal with Photoshop
power core: layers. It’s like to ask: how does Photoshop work? The
answer is: with layers. Once understood this concept, everything in
Photoshop will be more clear. As always, after a brief introduction, I’ll
drive you through a series of micro-tutorials to understand better this
matter. Let’s start!

How Photoshop works:

A graphics designer who understands layers mechanism in
Photoshop is like a soccer player who understand the offside rule.
It’s the key. What are layers and why are them so useful? You have
to think in this way: every composition realized in Photoshop is the
result of several layers combined together. So a layer can be defined
as the fundamental Photoshop unit.
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This example will show you the meaning of what I’m saying. Let’s
create a new document in Photoshop (File>New):

In the bottom right you should have the layers window. In case you
don’t see it, go to Window>Layers:

Here you can visualize, select and modify all the layers that
compose your final result. As you may have noticed, in this moment
we have a single white filled layer. Create a new layer by pressing
the appropriate button at the bottom of the layers window. Now you
can see a new layer, but nothing has changed in your canvas. This is
because Photoshop automatically create blank layers.
Set the foreground color to black by clicking on the foreground color
thumbnail to open the color picker and selecting black (#000000).

Now grab the Paint bucket tool (G) and click on the canvas to fill it
with black. Let’s analyse the layers window: the blank layer is now
black. This is because what we do on the canvas affects only the
layer which is selected. We have 2 layers, one black and one white.
Since the black one is above, it’s displayed while the white one is
hidden (layer hierarchy).
Switch the foreground color to yellow (#f9d904) and use the
horizontal type tool (T) to write something. Note that Photoshop has
automatically created a new type layer:

The background layer is locked (note the padlock on the right of the
layer thumbnail). This means it can’t be modified. To unlock the
background layer double click on it an hit OK in the window that
appears:
Every time you want to prevent a layer from casual adjustments you
can lock it by selecting it from the layers window and pressing the
lock button.

You can give a title to each layer. This is a good practice in particular
when you work with complex compositions. Simply double-click on
the layer title in the layers window to re-name it.
Select the bottom layer (the white one), set the foreground color to
orange (#eb6e08), grab the paint bucket tool and click to fill.
Apparently nothing has changed but the bottom layer is now filled
with orange, as you can notice from the layers window.

Select the black layer. Grab the eraser tool (E) and select a round
300px brush:
Click once in the center of the canvas. What happens? Once erased
the center of the black layer, a part of the orange one appears.

This is due to layers hierarchy:

In the layers window move the text layer below the black one:

As you may have imagined, a part of the text is covered, while the
area below the spot is preserved (layers hierarchy). Right-click on
the layers thumbnail and select Blending options. Here we can add
some adjustments to the layer. Select “drop shadow” with the
following settings (screenshot). In this way we can add depth to the
image:
You can add a soft shadow to the text too. In this way you can feel
more the sensation to work with 3 different levels one on the top of
the other.

Why are layers so useful?

In this mini-exercise I want to show you the usefulness that derives
from a correct use of layers. Create a new document in Photoshop
and unlock the background layer as we did in the previous tutorial.
Grab the brush tool and paint over the canvas:
What does happen if you want to move the brush effect? You’re
obliged to move the entire image (brush+white background):

Let’s go back. Instead of painting directly on the white canvas, create

a new layer and paint over it:
Seemingly the result doesn’t change. But this time if we try to move
only the brush effect…ta daaaaaaa! We can! Because we affect only
the layer that contains brushes. So this is the essence of the speech:
layers can give you full control on your works. In particular if properly
used they allow you to modify any detail of the composition at any
moment (full control!). And this is fundamental when you are working
on projects composed by 100-200 layers. Always try to create a new
layer for every important modification.

The key is organization

As I’ve previously written, titling each layer is a good practice to don’t
get lost among your layers. When the amount of layers grow up
consistently, you can set them up into groups. To create a group,
select the layers from the layers window and go to Layer>Group
layers (or press ctrl+G). Organization is not only a good practice,
but something important when you’re dealing with complex projects.
For example, tale a look at how I organized the layers of
WeGraphics theme layout. Every group contains 10+layers. Do you
imagine how the layers windows would look like if I hadn’t use
groups???

ginners: The Power of Layers

The most important concept you should understand about
Photoshop is its layering system. Layers allow you to stack different
objects and images to keep your work separated, ordered, and
easily editable.
This guide will walk you through the utility of layers using a hands-
on, step-by-step approach (so fire up Photoshop and get ready to
get your hands dirty before diving in).

4. Photoshop's Filters
In photography, filters are camera accessories that you place on
your lens to capture photos that will have fascinating effects. This
concept is digitally incorporated into Photoshop and is a convenient
way of editing your images quickly. Filters can be functional (such as
the Sharpen filters to help you correct blurry photos) or stylistic (such
as the Texture filters that give your images unique texture effects).
By reading through this tutorial, you will uncover the power of filters
in Photoshop.

Photoshop’s Filters
Filters are used to change the appearance of an image, layer or
selection in Photoshop. In this tutorial, I’ll introduce you to some
common filters, and show you how to use them.
For me, filters in Photoshop are sort of like those special effects you
can add to home videos with those consumer handheld video
cameras — easy to use, but they certainly have their place in
design . That said, there are plenty of ways to get creative using
filters, so they are definitely worth understanding in Photoshop!

Using Filters from the Filter Gallery

Photoshop’s Filter Gallery is basically a one-stop place for working
with filters in your documents. In the Filter Gallery, you can browse
through many different types of filters, apply them individually to your
image, or even stack them on top of one another like you would with
layers. You can get to the Filter Gallery by going to Filter > Filter
Gallery .
Here’s a quick overview of the Filter Gallery:
Filter Gallery Interface
A. Filter Preview
B. Filter List (Note: You can show or hide this list by clicking the
arrow icon to the top right of it )
C. Currently Selected Filter
D. Filter Options
E. Effect Layers
F. New / Delete Effect Layer
The Filter Effect Layers work just like ordinary filters in
Photoshop, and can be dragged and dropped on top of one
another for desired results.
Applying a filter from the gallery is very easy to do. Simply Click on
a filter , adjust it’s options to your liking, and click OK to apply. To
stack multiple filters on top of one another, just hit the New Effect
Layer (‘F’ in diagram above) , and select another filter. You can
expand filter types by clicking the folders in the filter list.

The Cutout Filter quickly transforms a photograph into an abstract piece of art.
Quicker Access to Filters
The Filter Gallery is really just a browser of sorts. If you know exactly
what kind of filter you want to use, you can access it directly from the
Filter menu in Photoshop to speed things up.

Using Other Filters

Not all filters in Photoshop are available through the Filter Gallery.
Many of them must be accessed directly through the Filter Menu ,
and have unique interfaces and options of their own.
We’re not going to go over every individual filter in this tutorial (doing
so would take a very long time ), but I highly suggest doing some
experimentation on your part with different filters to get an idea of
what some of them do.
Let’s look at some of the more common filters used frequently in
design.

Blur Filters (Filter > Blur)

The Blur Filters are useful in lots of situations. We’ve actually
written several popular tutorials on Tutorial9 that depend on the Blur
Filters, such as our article on Adding Depth of Field in Photoshop,
and our Windows Vista Aurora Effect Tutorial.

The Lens Blur Filter makes it very easy to create a realistic lens blur effect in
Photoshop.

Noise Filters (Filter > Noise)

Noise Filters are great for adding, or reducing noise and grain in
photographs. You may find filters such as the Reduce Noise Filter
extremely useful if you work with old, damaged, or dusty
photographs that need repair work done to them. The Add Noise
Filter can also come in handy, and has some creative applications of
its own.

Noise can easily be reduced with the Reduce Noise Filter in Photoshop.

Sharpen Filters (Filter > Sharpen)

The Sharpen Filters are also great for correcting imperfections in
photographs, as well as putting emphasis on important elements in a
design. When working with blurred images, a sharpen filter can be
used to clarify and better define edges by increasing contrast
between pixels.

The Smart Sharpen Filter used to sharpen a photograph of a statue.

Filters Disabled?
While all filters are available to be used on 8-bit RGB images, many
will be unavailable if working with other color spaces, 16-bit, or 32-bit
documents. Filters will also be unavailable for use in Bitmap and
Indexed-color documents.
If you’re not able to use filters, you may need to go to Image >
Mode , and make sure you’re set to RGB , and 8 Bits/Channel ,
although some image data may be lost.
5. Layer Styles in Photoshop

Layer styles are one or more effects that alter a layer. For example, if
you wanted to make a layer semitransparent or if you wanted to give
your text one of those slick "Web 2.0" gradient effects, you can do so
by applying and adjusting layer styles.
Adding layer styles, using layer style presets that come with
Photoshop, what the various layer effects do, and more are covered
in this tutorial.

Layer Styles in Photoshop

Effects can be added to individual layers in Photoshop that

automatically change as a layer is modified. The combination of
effects on any given layer is called its Layer Style. We’ll teach you
how to use and make your own layer styles in this tutorial.

What are Layer Styles?.

Layer styles are special effects that can be quickly and easily applied
to individual layers in Photoshop to drastically change the
appearance of something in very little time. They can be preset,
customized, or even saved and used for later.
One of the useful properties of Layer Styles are there relationship to
the layer contents. Since the style is actually a separate entity that is
just linked to the layer, it will continually update itself as a layers
contents are edited or moved. Furthermore, the effects can easily be
adjusted after applying them, making them non-destructive in nature.

Some shapes and text with and without layer styles applied.

Using Layer Style Presets

Photoshop comes packed with a good number of Layer Style

Presets , all which are accessible through the Styles Palette
(Window > Styles ). To apply a Layer Style , select the Layer you’d
like to work with in your document from the Layers Palette , and
then select the Layer Style which you would like to apply.
 A Text Layer Before and After a Layer Style Preset is applied to it.

After applying a Layer Style , the effects in the layer can be seen,
adjusted, disabled or reenabled from the Layers Palette . Layers with
effects applied to them will have a small round icon with an ‘f ‘ in it.
To expand or collapse the effects applied to a layer, click the arrow to
the right of this icon.
When a layers effects have been expanded, you can quickly disable
specific effects within the layer style by clicking the eye icon next to
the effect. Just like a layer, these effects can become visible again
by clicking the blank area (where the eye would reside ) when an
effect is disabled.
Making Quick Changes
You can make quick changes to a layers style by double clicking the
‘f ‘ icon to pull up the Layer Style Options . From here, you can
completely customize your layers style.

Creating your own Effects and Styles

To add your own layer effects, and create your own styles, go to
Layer > Layer Style > Blending Options , or Right Click your
Layer, and select Blending Options . This will bring up the Layer
Style Options .
A. Style Presets – List of the Style Presets.
B. Effects – The various effects that can be used in a layer style. It’s
important to note that by clicking on the name of any of the effects
will enable that effect, and display the options for the individual
effect.
C. Options / Settings – When the name for an effect is checked, it’s
options will be shown here. When Blending Options is selected,
settings such as Opacity, Fill, and other advanced options will be
displayed.
D. Layer Style Preview – A preview of the Layer Style.
Effects (B ) can be enabled by checking them, and likewise, disabled
by unchecking them. To edit an effect, you need to click the name
(rather than checkbox ). The effects settings will be displayed in the
Options area (C ), where they can be easily adjusted. To apply a set
of effects and options, simply press OK .

Layer Effects
Styles can be built with the following effects:
Drop Shadow – Creates a shadow behind the layers
contents.
Inner Shadow – Creates a shadow on top of the layers
contents.
 Outer Glow - Creates a glow behind the layers contents.
Cannot be distanced like the drop shadow.
Inner Glow – Creates a glow on top of the layers contents.
Again, cannot be distanced like the inner shadow.
Bevel and Emboss - Used to create unique highlight and
shadow effects on a layers contents.
Satin - Gives the layer contents a satin-like, glossy
appearance.
Color Overlay - Fills the layer contents with a solid color.
Gradient Overlay - Fills the layer contents with a gradient.
Pattern Overlay - Fills the layer contents with a pattern.
Stroke - Creates an outline on layer contents using a solid
color, gradient, or pattern.

Give it a Try!
Let’s try it out to make sure we’ve got a clear understanding of all
this. We’re going to test our abilities by creating a basic layer style
for some text. Go ahead and create a new document in Photoshop,
and use the Type Tool to add some large, black text.
Right Click the text layer, and Select Blending Options .
First we’re going to add a Drop Shadow . Check the Drow Shadow
Effect , and click on it to bring up it’s options. Set things up as shown
in the diagram below:
As you’re making adjustments, you should be able to see changes
being made in your actual document. Keeping an eye on your
document while adding effects will allow you to better determine how
to adjust settings.
You should be familiar with most of these sliders and types of
settings from our Palettes Tutorial you may have read. The Angle
setting may be a new one to you, but it’s very simple to work. You
can either enter in a numeric value, or adjust the angle with your
mouse by clicking on the wheel. Doing so will change the angle of
your shadow.
Now let’s add a Bevel and Emboss . We’re going to create a bevel
that is subtle, so that it doesn’t draw too much attention, but at the
same time pops our text a bit. Again, mimic the settings shown in the
diagram shown below.
Nothing really new here. You may want to experiment as I suggested
earlier to have a better understanding of the different settings here,
but most of them are pretty self-explanatory.
Now let’s add a Gradient Overlay .

By default, the Gradient Overlay will probably use a Foreground to

Background gradient, which is not exactly what we are looking for
(unless we’ve setup the Foreground and Background Colors in
Photoshop specifically for this step). That’s OK though, because we
can easily adjust the gradient from here.
Click on the gradient shown in the Gradient Picker (Black fading to
White in the above diagram ). This will bring up the Gradient Editor
. From the Gradient Editor , you may choose a gradient preset, or
create a new custom gradient of your own. Towards the bottom of
the editor is the current gradient, with Opacity Stops (Determine
how opaque the gradient is at a specific point ) and Color Stops
(Determine what colors are used in the Gradient ). We can add,
delete, and modify stops by clicking anywhere above or below the
gradient, or by clicking on the stops themselves.
We only want to modify the current color stops . Double Click the
first color stop, and apply the color #50a2e7, and then apply the
color #75cefc to the right most stop. Click OK to Apply the Gradient.
Click OK to apply the layer style you’ve created.

6. Photoshop 101 – Adjustment Layers

Adjustment layers are Photoshop layers that affect all other layers
beneath them (unless you use an adjustment layer as a clipping
mask — but that's an advanced topic for another day). It's typically
used to enhance a graphic, such as if you want to adjust the colors
of an image (which you can do with the Color Balance adjustment
layer).
This crash course in adjustment layers shows you what you can do
with them in Photoshop.
Photoshop – Adjustment Layers
Adjustment layers in Photoshop provide a quick, non-destructive way
to edit and and make changes to your photos. In this tutorial we will
cover some of the different types of adjustment layers and how they
work.
We will be working with the ‘fruit smile’ image that is available for
download here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/libraryman/95516793/sizes/l/
A quick preview of the different types of affects you can achieve with
adjustment layers:

Open the image in photoshop and in the bottom of the layers palette
click on the adjustment layer icon. This should bring up a menu of
different types of adjustment layers. All the options that are available
under image > adjustments are available to us in adjustment
layers. You can also make new adjustment layers by going to layer >
New adjustment layer.
As we create different types of adjustment layers we will be turning
the visibility off by clicking on the eye icon to the left of the layer. You
can use adjustment layers individually or combine them to create
compound effects.
Levels
You can use the Levels dialog box to correct the tonal range and
color balance of an image by adjusting intensity levels of image
shadows, midtones, and highlights.

Curves
The Curves dialog box or Levels dialog box to adjusts the entire
tonal range of an image. Ive changed the red channel just a bit to
make the photo look a bit more vintage.
Color Balance
Our original photo looks like it has a slight orange cast to it so we will
correct this by using the color balance adjustment layer. I have
change the settings to remove the red and increase the blue. This
should combat the orange tint.

Brightness and Contrast

Our photo looks a bit dark so lets turn off the previous adjustment
layer and create a new one. Select Brightness and contrast and
bump up the brightness a bit and contrast. This makes the photo
appear that it was taken on a sunny day.
Black and White
Using the black and white adjustment layer allows you to add tints to
your photos.

Hue / Saturation
The hue/saturation adjustment layer allows you to target specific
colors and change them. Lets say that we want to make the yellows
in the photo a bit more orange. Select yellow from the dropdown
menu and change the hue slider. Notice that this changes the colors
of the apples and banana.
Channel Mixer
The channel mixer adjustment layer allows you to create a black and
white image from your color image, with far more options than going
to image>grayscale . Tinker around with this adjustment layer until
you achieve a nice result.

Gradient Map
The gradient map adjustment layers can add subtle or not so subtle
color effects to your photos.
Photo Filter
The photo filter adjustment layer has several different options. I have
selecte the warming filter. Notice that it takes out some of the blue in
the photo and adds some orange. The cooling filter does the
opposite – it adds more blue and takes out the orange. The warming
filter also makes a great sepiatone affects for black and white
photos.

Posterize
The Posterize adjustment layer flattens the colors in the image and
allows you to set a number of levels of colors to allow. This filter
gives the photo a sort of illustrated effect.
7. Retouch and Healing Tools

For most casual Photoshop users, the most enticing and important
utility is the software's ability to correct, digitally enhance, and fix
photos.
This Photoshop tutorial covers the various tools and commands that
you can use to retouch and enhance your image, including a run-
down of the Patch tool, sharpening tools, and more.

Retouch and Healing Tools

Photoshop offers a large selection of tools and features for
retouching photographs and images. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how
to use the common touch-up tools.

Spot Healing Brush Tool

The Spot Healing Brush is primarily used to quickly remove
blemishes, imperfections or other unwanted elements from an
image. To use it, paint over an imperfection you’d like to get rid of
using a suitable brush (brushes can be selected and modified in the
options bar ). The Spot Healing Brush Tool will automatically try to
repair the imperfection by sampling the surrounding area.

Careful! Although the Spot Healing brush can be a great tool for
quick fixes, it’s not always guaranteed to work if the area
surrounding the imperfection is busy. Generally speaking, the
surrounding area should be an approximate match in color & texture
to what you want to take place of the unwanted element in your
image.

Healing Brush Tool

The Healing Brush Tool performs a similar function to the spot
healing brush tool mentioned above. Instead of automatically trying
to determine the lighting, shading, and texture from the surrounding
area, the healing brush tool lets you manually select a source, and
then paint over an imperfection. To select a source, hold alt and
click the desired part of the image . Then paint over the area you
wish to replace. As with the Spot Healing Brush Tool, settings such
as brush size can be controlled in the options bar .
Patch Tool
With the Patch Tool , an entire area can be repaired with pixels from
another area. Just like the healing brush tool, the patch tool will try to
correct lighting, shading, and texture. To use the patch tool, first
draw a selection with any of the selection tools (or the patch tool,
which will function as a lasso tool). Then, using the patch tool , drag
that selection over the destination you want to use to repair that
area.

Clone Stamp Tool

The final tool we’ll cover in this tutorial is called the Clone Stamp
Tool . The Clone stamp tool allows you to paint with a sample of an
image.
Keep in mind that you are not healing/repairing an image when you
use the Clone Stamp Tool. Therefore, lighting and shading will not
be maintained when you paint over an area. What you see is
literally what you get when you paint from a given source, making it
very useful in certain situations.

Blur & Sharpen Tools

The Blur and Sharpen Tools allow us to manipulate edges by
making them softer or harder. They do exactly what you would
expect them to do; blur and sharpen.
Both tools have similar attributes such as Strength (increase or
decrease the strength of the tool, or how much it will blur) and the
brush , all of which can be adjusted in the Options Bar for each tool.
To use the blur or sharpen tool, simply set up the brush to your
specification, hold down the mouse button, and hover over the areas
you’d like to alter in your image.

You should have a pretty good feel of the basic retouching tools by
now. The next step in mastering Photoshop is usually learning how
to use the painting tools to compliment your photo remastering
abilities!
8. A Comprehensive Introduction to the Type
Tool

Whether you want to add a text caption on a photograph, lay out a

brochure's copy, or create your typographical poster masterpiece,
the tool that will help you get the work accomplished is the humble,
but powerful, Type tool.
Creating text layers, resizing and modifying text, and adjusting text
characteristics, such as tracking and line-height, are a few of the
topics covered in this tutorial.

1. The Basics
Type is the Photoshop tool to create vector outlines and
mathematical shapes to define the symbols of a typeface. It's located
on the standard Tool Bar as a tiny T . The keyboard shortcut of this is
the letter (T), and if you hold click over that tool (or Shift + T several
times) you'll see four options: Horizontal Type, Vertical Type,
Horizontal Type Mask and Vertical Type Mask.
Horizontal Type Tool : This enables the tool to create
horizontal standard text (left to right and top to bottom).
Vertical Type Tool : Enables the tool to create vertical text
(top to bottom and right to left), useful to write in oriental
languages like Japanese or Chinese, or if you want to
experiment with typographic design.
Horizontal Type Mask Tool, Vertical Type Mask Tool :
Creates a Quick mask using the Type shape as a
 Selection. We'll see more application of these modes
shortly.

Once you've select your desired Type Tool, you'll notice the mouse
cursor changes into the standard Type cursor, something like an I ,
this means the document is ready to put text on it.

2. Creating a Type Layer

There's two ways to create a text layer, which are Point and
Paragraph Type:
Point Type : This option will create a Type layer into a
single line, the break lines must be placed by you hitting
Return or Enter in the keyboard.

To create a Point Type layer select your desired Type Tool

(Horizontal or Vertical text), and click one time with the cursor
anywhere you want to put the text in. Then just start writing,
when you have finished to add the text you can either click the
tiny Commit button on the Option bar, hit the Enter key on the
numeric pad of your keyboard or just hit Command + Enter.
Paragraph Type : This option will create a Text layer with
text wrapping into a bounding box. Is pretty useful for both
print and web design. To add a Paragraph layer you must
create the bounding box first. You can Click and Drag the
cursor diagonally until you've got your desired size.
Doesn't matter if there's a background image, or any other object,
the Type tool will create a new layer for the new text. Besides, you
can easily switch between Point to Paragraph type or vice versa by
going to Layer > Type > Convert to Paragraph Text / Convert to Point
Text.

3. Resize and Transform

Obviously, you can resize and transform each text layer as any
other, do it by using the Move Tool (V), selecting the layer and
Showing Transform controls. Anyway this kind of transforming will
stretch, enlarge, or badly distort the type shape.
If you really want a good result on a Paragraph Type layer, you must
do the following: Select the Type tool, and click over the Paragraph
text, then go to one of the transform handles and click and drag to
resize the box, the text will automatically reflow inside the new box.
Shift-drag to preserve the proportion or keep a constant rotation
increment, Command-drag to scale the type, Command-drag on a
center handle to skew the type box, and Option-drag to resize the
box from its center.
4. Character Options
Basic Formatting
It's time to move forward. After typing some text, you obviously want
to change the font face, color and more, this is really simple. First
show the Character window by going to Window > Character. The
Character window has several Options to format characters,
following there're some examples about formatting Font Family,
Style, Size and Color (you must double-click on color sample to see
the color picker). After committing the type, you can either click on
the text miniature in the Layers panel and change the entire text
layer format or with the Type tool selected, click on the text layer you
want to edit, make a selection and change the character format of
the selected text.
Kerning and Tracking
You can easily customize both Kerning and Tracking in Photoshop.
Select a text layer or make a text selection and look in Character
window for the Kern and Track values.
You're able to customize the kern (space between specific pairs of
characters) by selecting between Metrics Kerning or Optical Kerning.
Metrics will automate adjust kern using the included pairs of the font
you're using. Optical will adjust the kern based on the font shape.
Besides you can customize the kern values by typing a numeric
value (positive or negative) in the Kerning field or select one of the
presets.
Tracking is very similar, just set a numeric value (positive or
negative) to increase / reduce space between the letters. Besides
you can combine both Kern and Track to obtain a nice result.
Vertical and Horizontal Scaling
Scale the text layer both horizontally and vertically by changing the
Scale values in the Character window. Just as advice, I almost never
use those scaling values because when you distort a typeface you're
distorting the shape itself, and sometimes creating an undesirable
result, look at the image below, the nice Century Gothic's 'O'
character is a perfect circle without scaling it, and it turns into an oval
when you change the scaling values. Besides notice the shapes
aren't regular, i.e. the line width is wider at top and bottom of the 'O'
character when you change the vertical scaling.
Baseline Shift
This is very useful when you want to make your text layer fit
somewhere, such as around an image. Change this value to move
the baseline of a text selection above or below the baseline of the
rest of the text layer.
Faux Bold and Faux Italic
Photoshop has the option to auto create a Faux Bold and Italic
variation for any typeface, pretty useful sometimes, but you must
take special care in order to distort the type shape as little as
possible. Below there are examples of Faux Bold on the Arial
typeface, which isn't distorting the type shape that much, but
applying Faux Italic on Myriad Pro actually distorts the original italic
style of the typeface (look at the 'a' character for example).
Font Variants and Text Decoration
You can easily customize the font variant, Capitalizing all the
characters, or convert it to Small Caps. To do so, just select a text
layer, or make a text selection, and click on the respective button in
the Character Window. Besides, you can edit the text decoration as
Underline or Strikethrough.
Anti-aliasing, Where and When
Anti-aliasing produces smooth-edged text making the text borders
blend into the background layer/image. There're four anti-aliasing
options: Sharp, Crisp, Strong and Smooth, and obviously the option
None. Often, you must apply some anti-aliasing to every text layer in
your design for easily reading in particular into Serif typefaces.
There're some exceptions when you should set None as anti-aliasing
value, i.e. when you're adding sample text for web design content,
when using a pixel typeface, etc.
Leading
Either in both Point or Paragraph text layer you can adjust the
leading (vertical space) between lines. Leave it as an automatic
value by selecting (auto) for the Leading value, or type a custom
value to adjust the space by yourself.
5. Paragraph Options
Basic Alignment
Since a Paragraph Text Layer can contain multiple lines, formatting
them is very important for the quality of any design, that's what the
Paragraph window is about. Open it by going to Window >
Paragraph. Create a paragraph text layer, type something, commit
the text and click on the layer miniature to activate the options for the
entire text. Alternatively, you can make a text selection by using the
Type tool, and apply paragraph formatting only into the selected lines
of your text layer.
Of course, the basic feature on Paragraph text is Align. You can
easily customize the alignment (Left, Center, Right or Justify) by
clicking on the icons in the Paragraph window, besides there are
three more options for Justify Alignment, changing the alignment of
the last line of the text layer or the selected text (Left, Center, Right).
To customize the Justify alignment, go to the Paragraph palette
menu and click on Justification, there you'll be able to configure
Word and Letter Spacing, Glyph Scaling and Auto Leading
percentages.
Hyphenation
The settings you choose for hyphenation affects the horizontal
spacing of the paragraph, making it wider or stretching it, depending
on the words of each line. To apply hyphenation into a Paragraph
Text Layer, just choose the language in the Character Window, and
activate Hyphenation in the Paragraph window. To disable
Hyphenation, just uncheck the option box in the Paragraph window.
Most of time the automatic Hyphenation will work just fine for you,
but sometimes you'll need to customize it. To enable advanced
Hyphenation options click on the Paragraph panel menu and select
Hyphenation. You'll see the following options:
Words Longer Than # Letters : set the minimum number of
characters for your hyphenated words; i.e. if you set a
value of 5, the word 'photo' will be not hyphenate, but if you
set the value '3' you'll get 'pho-to.' The default value is '2.'
After First # Letters and Before Last # Letters : specifies
the minimum number of characters at the beginning or end
of a word that can be broken by a hyphen, i.e. if you set
any of those values as '1' you could have an undesirable
hyphenation, such as "h-ello" or "actio-n." By default both
values are set as '2.'
Hyphen Limit : set the maximum number of consecutive
lines on which hyphenation may occur.
Hyphenation Zone : set a distance from the right edge of a
paragraph.
Hyphenate Capitalized Words : prevents hyphenation of
capitalized words.
Indent and Space Between Paragraphs
Indenting is quite easy. Just select a text layer, or make a text
selection, and write or slice both left or right Indent values. You can
indent a text selection left or right, or indent the first line of a
Paragraph as shown in the second image below.
Besides, you can easily add space between paragraphs (before or
after) in the Paragraph window, just type a custom value in the
Space Before or the Space After paragraph.
Warp Text
One of the most powerful features of the Type Tool is the capability
to Warp any text layer according to your particular needs. To Warp a
type layer double-click on the Text Layer Miniature and click over the
Create Warped Text button in the Options Menu. You'll be prompted
to select a Warp Style orientation (Vertical or Horizontal), then you'll
have three sliders to increase or decrease the values of Bend,
Horizontal and Vertical Distortion. Below is a single example of how
to warp Point text by using Arc Warp and different values of Bend
and Distortion.
Of course you can Warp a Paragraph Text Layer as well, see the
image below. It shows a simple way to get the famous "Star Wars"
intro effect just by increasing the Vertical Distortion and with the help
of a small Gradient Layer Mask.

Warping text is really funny, try it with different warp options. There're
a few restrictions though, you cannot Warp a Text Layer if you
applied previously Faux Bold, or Faux Italic styles in the Character
panel.

Type on a Path
You can create a type layer that flows along a work path created by
using the Pen Tool or Vector Shape Tool. To create a Type on a path,
first draw a path by using the Pen Tool, then select the Type Tool and
place the cursor anywhere on the path, you'll see the shape of the
cursor changes the baseline for an S shaped line. Click on the path
and write some text.
Path on a Shape
The process to add a text layer on a vector shape is the same. First,
ensure the vector shapes is selected, do this by using the Path
Selection Tool to select the shape. Once the path is visible, select
the Type Tool and click anywhere over the path and write something.
You can edit any Character option, a good example is increasing the
Baseline Shift a little bit to create a space between text and shape.

Edit Type on a Path

Sometimes you'll need to change the orientation and position of the
type on a path. For this, select the Path Selection Tool, place the
cursor over the text until you get a little black arrow on the type
cursor, then Drag the cursor below the baseline to flip the type. Use
the same method to flip the text and place it inside a shape.
Obviously, you can add any layer style to the text layer and this will
continue being editable.
Convert Type into Shape
Several times we'll need to be able to change or modify the shape of
a character, for several purposes, like logo design, Photoshop
makes this easy. Just create a text layer or select one and go to
Layer > Type > Convert to Shape. This tool will convert the type into
a Vector Layer Mask, which can be edited as any other vector
shape. You can also create a Work path by going to Layer > Type >
Convert Work Path.
Advertisement

Type Mask Tool

Finally, you can do most of the described features of the type tool,
but using Selections instead type shapes. For this click and hold on
the Type Tool until more options appears. There select Horizontal (or
Vertical) Type Mask. By selecting this tool you'll be able to create a
quick selection with the shape, which is pretty useful on either Layer
Mask or Quick Mask mode. Below is a small example of a word
written using the Type Mask Tool. I used that selection to create a
Layer Mask over a picture.
6. Conclusion
Type tool is one of the most powerful features of Photoshop. With
practice you'll become a master after playing with characters and
paragraphs. There are no limits of what you can create with this
wonderful tool..

9. Photoshop 101: How To Use The Free

Transform Tool

The Free Transform command is going to be your go-to tool for

resizing, rotating, and modifying your graphics. This Photoshop
tutorial will show you just how handy Free Transform is in your image
editing workflow.
Photoshop 101: How To Use The Free Transform
Tool
The free transform tool can be daunting if you don’t know how to use
it. The tool has a lot of hidden options that make it quite powerful. In
this tutorial we will be manipulating a simple square to show you the
basics and then we will move on to a real life application.

First: The basics

Step 1: Draw A square with the rectangle tool (u)
Step 2: Select Edit>Free Transform Path (or
Command+T)

You should see little handles on the corners and the middle of the
sides of the square.

Step 3: Grab one of the handles and drag it from

the square
Go ahead and experiment. Adding keyboard shortcuts while using
the transform tool is being used really unleashes its power.

Free Transform Tool + Keyboard Shortcuts

Grabbing a handle and dragging alters the shape. Holding down shift
while dragging a handle preserves the aspect ratio of the shape.

Holding down option when dragging moves the sides equal

distances from the center reference point.

Hovering your mouse over a corner reference point allows you to

rotate the shape. Holding down shift while rotating snaps the shape
to 45 degree angles from the original position.
Holding down Option+Command allows you to move both sides
equally from the reference point and vertically as well – allowing you
to skew the object.

Holding down Shift+Option+command allows you to add perspective

to an object.
You can also achieve similar distortions with the specific transform
tools which do the same thing. These tools can be found under the
Edit>Transform menu. One tool that is notable and worth pointing
out is the warp transform tool.

Warp Transform Tool

This tool ads a grid over the shape and allows you to distort and
warp specific points of the shape.

Now that we have the basics down lets do

something cool!
I did a search over at iStockphoto for ‘blank billboard’ and found this
photo :
We’ll also be using my favorite banana image again!
Cut out the bananas in the shape of the blank billboard area.

Place your type over the billboard and then right click and convert to
shape. This allows us to preserve the quality of the vector image
while distorting.

This may take some time, but with some small fineagling with the
perspective and skew tools you can get the type to look just right.
Then add some outer glow behind the type to make it pop whiz
bang!
10. Master Photoshops Selection Tools in Under
30 Minutes

Maybe you want to remove the background from a photo, or select

just a certain object in an image and use it in another Photoshop
document. Whatever the case, selecting things inside your canvas is
a task you should expect to do plenty of times in your 'shopping
career.
Set aside 30 minutes, follow this Photoshop tutorial, and you'll know
all there is to know about the assorted tools and techniques for
selecting areas in your work.
The Selection Tools In Photoshop
In this article I’ll explain some of the different and powerful selection
tools that are available in Photoshop. This guide is aimed at
beginners, but can hopefully provide a few extra pointers for more
advanced users. Personally I find it very easy to get stuck using only
one selection tool, when it can be beneficial to experiment with
several in your work.

The Marquee Tools:

The Marquee Tools consist of the Rectangle, Elliptical, Single Row
and Single Column selection tools. These are the most basic
selection tools in Photoshop. The keyboard shortcut for these tools is
the letter ‘M’.

The Rectangle Tool

The Rectangle tool allows you to draw rectangles or squares. Click

and drag on your page to draw a square. You can hold the key, ‘Shift’
whilst you are dragging out your cursor which will create a perfectly
shaped square. You can also hold the key, ‘Alt’ which will enable you
to draw from the centre of the square instead of the corner.
If you’d like to move the square’s position when you are dragging it
out, hold down ‘Space’, move the square to your desired position
and then release ‘Space’.
The Elliptical Tool

This tool allows you to draw circles & ellipses. Like the Rectangle
Tool you are able to hold the keys, ‘Shift, Alt and Space’ to edit the
circle when you are drawing it.

The Single Row & Single Column Tools

The Single Row Tool and the Single Column Tool allows you to
select a single row of pixels across the image. All you do is click on
the image and it will automatically draw a line the length of your
document.

The Lasso Tools

The Lasso Tools consist of the Lasso, Polygonal and Magnetic
selection tools. The shortcut for these tools is the letter, ‘L’.
Lasso Tool

The Lasso Tool is a quick way to select an area but doesn’t allow
you to select it precisely. All you do is click, hold and draw to create
a selection. After you release your click the selection completes
itself.

Polygonal Lasso Tool

This tool lets you create more accurate lines as you create straight
lines so you have more control of what you want to select. This tool
is much more flexible compared to the Lasso Tool. To start using this
Tool all you do is click onto your picture and then start clicking
around your area you want to select. With this tool you do not have
click and drag. To finish the selection you can click onto the 1st point
where you started off or double click anywhere on the picture, as this
will draw a straight line to the 1st point.
Magnetic Lasso Tool

This tool is different to the other Lasso Tools as it traces the area for
you. I’ll be tracing this image from here
http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1153097
This tool works a lot better with images like this one, as there are
only two colours. It isn’t generally that precise when working with
more detailed pictures, but it can be more effective when used with
the Quick Mask (discussed later in this article) as you’re able to fine-
tune the selection.
To start using this tool, click on to your document and start moving
your mouse. You’ll notice that the line will start to trace around the
image. To finish the selection click onto your 1st point where you
clicked or double click and the line will join up to the 1st point
automatically.

The Magic Wand

When you click onto your picture the Wand will select similar colours
around it. Your Tolerance value at the top of the screen determines
the range of colours that are selected. A low Tolerance value of 10
will select 10 darker and 10 lighter luminance levels from where you
clicked. A high Tolerance value does the opposite. It will select a
large range of colours.

Tolerance value of 10

Tolerance value of 100

Colour Range
The Colour Range method is a great method to use with
photographic pieces. I’ve used this picture from
http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1168546 to show you how to change the
sky’s colour.
Go to ‘Select’ and then click Colour Range and this dialog box will
appear.

Here you can add and remove colours you would like to select. The
Fuzziness bar is a bit like the Magic Wand’s tolerance setting. The
higher you set the value, the amount of colours selected increases
and the lower you set the value the amount of colours selected
decreases. With the dialog box open you’ll notice that when you
hover over your canvas the eyedropper tool will be selected. I clicked
onto the sky and then set the fuzziness value to 82. All the sky
should be the colour white and the sign and building will be the
colour black. The colour white indicates what is going to be selected.
Now you can click OK and the marching ants will be around the sky
which will enable you do whatever you want with that selected area.

The Pen Tool

The Pen Tool is my favourite tool for selecting areas of a picture. I

find it very useful for selecting tricky areas and just generally
selecting anything.
If you’d like the picture I am using you can get it here
http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1168742
To use the Pen Tool as a selection method all you do is click around
the area you want to select, right click and click on the option, ‘Make
Selection’.

This box will then show.

You’ll notice that there is an option to set the feather radius amount.
The lower the value, the sharper the edges and the higher the value,
the softer the edges. Try feathering the selection on the value 1 and
then go back and enter 30. After clicking OK in this box I copied and
pasted the selection and turned off the original layer. This is how
mine looks.
Feathered with the value 1

Feathered with the value 30

Quick Mask
This method is quite useful as it gives you quite a bit of control on
what you want to select. The shortcut to enter the Quick Mask mode
is, ‘Q’ or you can click here to enter this mode.

When you enter Quick Mask mode the colour palette should change
automatically. Black should be the foreground colour and white
should be the background colour (if for any some reason it isn’t,
press ‘D’ on your keyboard to reset the colours). In this mode you
use the Brush Tool to produce a selection area. You will notice that
when you start using the Brush Tool with the colour black, it will
‘paint’ the colour red. Don’t worry, this is meant to happen! Painting
with this colour adds to the selection. If you swap the colours round
by clicking the two small arrows next to the colours and start painting
with the colour white, this will erase parts of the mask. You can
change the sizes and hardness’ of the brushes in the Quick Mask
mode. This enables you to select the edges of area neatly and
precisely. To exit the Quick Mask mode press ‘Q’ or click on the
Quick Mask button.
After exiting Quick Mask mode you will then have the ‘marching ants’
around the area you didn’t paint red. This enables you to edit this
area or invert the selection so you can edit the area you painted red.
Layer Mask
A Layer Mask is a useful, non-destructive way of editing. They allow
you to go back and edit the selection you made to a layer. It also
saves you from being very annoyed if you erase a certain part of a
layer and then decide later on that you want it!
To create a layer mask make a selection of what you would like to
keep and click the ‘Add Layer Mask’ button.

Your selected area has been converted into a layer mask. A small
thumbnail is now linked to your original layer.

To edit the layer mask click on the layer mask’s thumbnail. Now you
can either paint in black or white to edit the layer. Painting in the
colour black will mask the pixels in the original layer and painting in
the colour white will reveal the pixels in the original layer.

11. Installing And Managing Brushes And Other

Presets
If you'd like to speed up your workflow and extend Photoshop, it's
best to understand how to manage presets. This tutorial specifically
covers installing and managing Photoshop brushes, but will also get
you started into exploring various other presets such as patterns,
custom shapes, and so forth.

Step 1
We’ll be talking specifically about Photoshop Brushes in this tutorial,
but the process is exactly the same for adding and managing
Swatches, Gradients, Styles, Patterns, Contours and Custom
Shapes as well, so just know that even though I’m talking about
brushes, the information shared here applies the all these. Before we
get into the meat of the lesson, lets start by taking a quick look at
how Photoshop stores and uses these things.
Photoshop allows us to keep as many brushes in the Brush palette
as we’d like, but the more stuff you pack into the palettes the slower
those palettes will load (because every brush takes a little memory)
and the harder it’ll be to find the brush you’re looking for. I find that
organizing and properly naming my brush sets in an external
Brushes folder and then loading only the brushes I need for a
specific project makes my life much easier.
Step 2
By default, Photoshop keeps it’s extras and plugins inside it’s
program files folder structure, and although you could simply load
everything into Photoshop’s default folders, I find it’s useful to create
a folder set of my own to keep additional Brushes etc. inside. There’s
nothing more frustrating than spending hours and hours searching
for and downloading the perfect brushes only to loose them
accidentally when upgrading or re-installing Photoshop.
I keep a folder called Photoshop Extras in the Documents folder of
my computer, and in that folder I have sub-folders for all the different
kinds of add-ons that Photoshop can use. I keep all my downloaded
brush sets there. To make Photoshop see the contents of this extra
folder, all you have to do is create a shortcut to this additional folder
in Photoshop’s default brushes folder and SHAZAM! the brushes
from both folders will appear in the Preset Manager.
Like I said, this step isn’t necessary, and it’s just fine if you want to
put your new brushes in Photoshop’s default Brushes folder, but this
what I do because it makes it easy to backup, restore and even
share all my 3rd party stuff. Plus, it satisfies my obsessive
compulsive need for excess organization.
Step 3
Ok, with my compulsive organizational speech out of the way, lets go
ahead and find a set of brushes to install. There are a ton of great
places to find free Photoshop Brushes on the internet, but probably
the most comprehensive and FREE brush site I’ve found is
BrushKing.eu (at this moment the site has 239 Brush sets containing
an astounding 4285 Brushes). And I’m proud to have them as a
sponsor of the site this month, so please take some time to check
out their huge brush selection. Did I mention they’re free?
If you want to follow along at home, I’m downloading a brush set
called "Unreal Brushes v.4 ", and once it’s downloaded I’m going to
put it into the Photoshop Extras> Brushes folder that I mentioned
above. You’ll notice that sometimes these brush sets download with
funky names, so I always rename them with a description that I’ll
recognize, in this case I’ll call them "GlowingLight.abr" because
that’s what the screenshot for the brushes looked like.
(*note: For this example I’ve cleared out my Brushes folder so it’s
easy to see the new brush set.)

Step 4
Now that the new brush set has been moved to our Brushes folder
and renamed, lets open Photoshop and load it into our Brush Picker!
Although you can load brushes from the Brush Picker itself, let me
show you another way. From the Main menu choose Edit>Preset
Manager. The Preset Manager allows you to manage all your
presets from one place and I’ve found it seems to work a little faster
than working directly inside the Brush picker.
Choose Brushes from the drop-down menu at the top.
Step 5
Inside the Preset manager you’ll notice a little circle with an arrow
inside it at the top right side of the display area, and if you click it
with your mouse it will open up a menu that has been populated with
all the available brushes from Photoshop’s Brushes folder (as well as
the brushes from the secondary Brushes folder that we talked about
earlier if you chose to create it). You can see in the example below
that my GlowingLight brush set is listed.
When you click on one of the brush sets, Photoshop will give you
two options, to either add this new brush set to your existing brushes
or to replace the existing brushes, click Append to add them, or OK
to replace them. For my example I just clicked OK to replace the
existing brushes with the new set.
(*note: Photoshop builds a cache of available brushes when it first
opens, so if your new brush set doesn’t show up and you already
had Photoshop running, you may need to restart the program to get
it to appear in the list.)
Step 6
You can now see that the stock brushes in my Preset Manager have
been replaced with the new GlowingLight set I chose.
On a side note, while inside the Preset Manager you can click and
drag brushes to re-order them and you can delete a brush from the
manager by Option-Clicking (PC: Alt-Clicking) on it. Deleting a brush
from the picker is non-destructive and if you reload that brush set,
the brush you deleted will re-appear (unless of course you resave
the brush set over itself, and in that case any changes you’ve made
will obviously be permanent).
And that’s it folks, the brushes are loaded and available for use and
now you know how to add Brushes (as well as Shapes, Gradients
etc) to the Photoshop Preset Manager and hopefully you’ve picked
up a trick or two about file handling and organization along the way.
12. Photoshop Actions

Do you find yourself repeating certain tasks in Photoshop over and

over again? Maybe you're constantly resizing your images manually
to a certain width and then saving them as a JPEG for use on your
blog. Or maybe you've unearthed the perfect combination and
sequence of filters and layer styles, and would like a way to
automatically apply it to a batch of images. Check out Photoshop
actions, a feature that enables you to record and save a sequence of
actions.
Photoshop Actions Tutorials
Photoshop Actions – Saving
And Loading Actions
If you've taken the time to record an action in Photoshop, or you've
edited an existing action, you're going to want to save it, otherwise
you run the risk if losing it if Photoshop decides to crash on you.
Thankfully, Adobe has made it easy for us to save our actions,
although there is one thing you need to be aware of. Photoshop
does not allow us to save individual actions. We can only save action
sets. So if you record or edit an action and want to save it (which of
course you'll want to do), you'll need to select and save the entire
action set. This is one of the main reasons why I suggested earlier
that you should avoid placing your own actions inside any of the
action sets that Photoshop comes with. Keep all of your actions
inside your own action sets, which will make it easy to save them,
load them, and keep them organized.
To save an action set, first select the set you want to save in the
Actions palette. I have a couple of actions inside my "My Actions" set
- the "Soft Glow" action we created in the previous section and the
"Improved Photo Corners" action, which is a customized version of
the original "Photo Corners" action that comes with Photoshop. I
want to save this action set, so I'll select it in the Actions palette:

Select the action set you want to save in the Actions palette.
With the action set selected, click on the menu icon in the top right
corner of the Actions palette, or if you're using Photoshop CS2 or
earlier, click on the small right-pointing arrow. This brings up the
Actions palette's menu. Select Save Actions from the menu:

Choose "Save Actions" from the Actions palette's menu.

Photoshop will pop open the Save dialog box. Save your action set
to a location on your computer where you'll be able to easily access
it later. I've created a folder on my Desktop named "Actions" and I'll
save the "My Actions" set into this folder. This will make it easy for
me to find the action set later if I need to load it back into Photoshop.
Make sure you save your action set with the extension ".atn" after
the name if you want your actions to be playable on both a PC and a
Mac. When you're ready, click on the Save icon in the dialog box to
save your actions:

Choose a location to save your action set, then click "Save".

Your actions are now saved! If Photoshop crashes at this point, your
actions will be safe. Of course, if your computer crashes, you'll
probably lose Photoshop, your actions and everything else, so I
would highly suggest backing up your actions on to a recordable CD
or DVD, or on to an external hard drive just in case.
Resetting The Actions Palette To The Defaults
Now that we've saved our actions, let's clear everything out of the
Actions palette and reset it to just the Default Actions set. To do that,
click once again on the menu icon in the top right corner of the
Actions palette, or the small arrow if you're using a version of
Photoshop prior to CS3, and select Reset Actions from the menu:

Select "Reset Actions" from the Actions palette's menu.

Photoshop will pop up a warning box, as if often does, asking if you
really want to replace the existing actions with the Default Actions
set. Click OK to close the dialog box and rest your actions:

Click OK in the warning box that appears.

If we look in our Actions palette now, we can see that all of the action
sets have disappeared. Only the Default Actions set remains:

The actions have now been reset in the Actions palette.

Loading Actions Into Photoshop

Now that we've cleared out and cleaned up our Actions palette, let's
load the action set we saved a moment ago. Click on the menu icon
(or the small right-pointing arrow) in the top right corner of the
Actions palette to bring up the menu, then select Load Actions from
the menu choices:
Select "Load Actions" from the Actions palette's menu.
This brings up the Load dialog box. Navigate to where you saved
your action set on your computer, select the action set, then click on
the Load button in the dialog box. My action set was saved to a
folder named "Actions" on my Desktop, so that's where I'll navigate
to. I'll click on the "My Actions" set, then I'll click Load :

Navigate to your action set, select it, then click on the "Load" button.
And now, if we look once again in the Actions palette, we can see
that the "My Actions" set has been successfully loaded back in to
Photoshop:

The "My Actions" set has been loaded back in to Photoshop.

Photoshop Actions – Recording
An Action
If you've been following along from the very beginning of our look at
Photoshop actions, give yourself a pat on the back because we've
covered a lot of information! If you skipped everything and jumped
right to this page, well, that's okay, too, but you've missed a lot. We
looked at what actions are, we explored the Actions palette, we
learned the difference between an action and an action set, we
looked at the Default Actions set that Photoshop loads automatically
for us as well as the additional sets that install with Photoshop, we
learned how to see exactly what's going on inside an action by
playing through it one step at a time, and we learned how to edit an
action! And let's not forget all the little extras we've covered, like how
to view the details of an action, including the specific details of each
step, how to show and hide dialog boxes when playing an action,
how to turn individual steps on an off, and even where to find
Photoshop's "classic" default actions if you're using Photoshop CS2!
At this point, we've covered pretty much everything we need to know
about actions, which means we're ready to record our very own
actions in Photoshop!
In this section, we'll look at how to record a simple "Soft Glow" effect
as an action. Once we're done recording it, you'll be able to instantly
apply the effect to any image you want! Here's the image I'll be
using:
The photo that will be used while recording the action.
Let's get started!

Step 1: Create A New Action Set If Needed

As I mentioned previously, all actions must be placed inside an
action set. You can have hundreds of actions in a set or a single
action, it makes no difference. All Photoshop cares about is that you
place all of your actions inside action sets. Back when we looked at
how to edit an action in Photoshop , we learned that to create a
new action set, all we need to do is click on the New Action Set icon
at the bottom of the Actions palette. It's the icon that looks like a
small folder, since action sets are really just folders that we store
actions in:

Create a new action set by clicking on the New Action Set icon at the
bottom of the Actions palette.
This brings up the New Set dialog box where you can enter a name
for your new action set. I've already created a new action set, which I
named "My Actions". If you've already worked through the "Editing
An Action" section of these tutorials, you'll most likely have already
created a new action set as well, in which case there's no need to
create a new one here. If you haven't yet created your own action
set, go ahead and create one now. We can see in the screenshot
that I've entered the name "My Actions" for my set, but of course you
can name your set whatever you like:

The "New Set" dialog box allows you to enter a name for your new
action set.
Click OK when you're done to exit out of the dialog box, and if you
look in your Actions palette, you'll see your new set appear below
any other action sets you currently have loaded into Photoshop.
Since I'm using the same set that I created previously, we can see
that I also have the "Improved Photo Corners" action, which we
edited earlier, already available inside the set. If you just created a
new set, your set will appear empty for the moment:

The new action set appears inside the Actions palette.

Keep in mind that you don't have to create a new action set every
time you want to create a new action. As long as you already have
an action set to place your new action in, you can place as many
actions inside the set as you like. It's a good idea, though, not to
place any of your own actions inside any of the sets that are installed
with Photoshop, like the Default Actions set, the Image Effects set,
the Frames set, and so on. Keep the actions you create yourself
inside your own action set or sets.
Step 2: Create A New Action
Now that we an action set to place our new action in, let's create our
action! To create a new action, click on the New Action icon at the
bottom of the Actions palette:

Click on the "New Action" icon to create a new action.

This brings up the New Action dialog box. Here, we can enter a
name for our new action, as well as choose the action set to place
the action in. Since we'll be recording the steps needed to create a
simple soft glow effect, I'm going to name my action "Soft Glow".
Directly below the input box where you entered the name of your
action, you'll find the Set option. This is where we select which action
set to place the action in. If your new action set is not already
selected, select it from the list. Here, we can see that I'll be placing
my "Soft Glow" action inside the "My Actions" set:

Enter a name for your new action and select the action set to place
your action in.
You'll notice a couple of other options at the bottom of the New Acton
dialog box. The Function Key option allows you to assign a keyboard
shortcut to your new action if you wish, using any of the Function
Keys, along with the Shift key and / or the Ctrl (Win) / Command
(Mac) key. Personally, I wouldn't bother with this since it's already
very easy to play an action simply by clicking on the Play icon in the
Actions palette. You'll also find a Color option here, allowing you to
assign a color to your action. This is only relevant if you're viewing
your actions in Button Mode, which there's no need to get into here.
You can safely ignore the Color option, and I would ignore the
Function Key option as well, but that's just me.

Step 3: Click The "Record" Button

When you're done, click on the Record button in the top right corner
of the dialog box:

Click on the "Record" button to begin recording your new action.

As soon as you click on the Record button, you'll see your new
action appear in your action set inside the Actions palette. You'll also
see that the Record icon at the bottom of the palette has turned red,
letting you know that you're now in record mode:

The action now appears in the Actions palette, and the Record icon
turns red.
Remember, there's no reason to panic. Yes, we're now in record
mode, but this isn't like recording a movie. Actions are not recorded
in real time. All Photoshop is going to record are the actual steps we
perform, not how long it takes us to complete them.
Okay, let's begin recording the steps for our action!

Step 4: Make Snapshot

For the first step in my "Soft Glow" effect action, I'm going to tell
Photoshop to take a snapshot of how the image looks just before the
effect is applied. You don't necessarily have to include this as the
first step in an action, but since it gives us an easy way to undo the
effect if we need to, it doesn't hurt to include it. So, with Photoshop
recording what I'm doing, I'm going to switch over to my History
palette for a moment, which by default is sitting next to the Actions
palette, and I'll click on the New Snapshot icon at the bottom of the
palette:

Taking a snapshot of the image as the first step in the "Soft Glow"
action.
This adds a new snapshot to the top of the History palette:

The snapshot appears at the top of the History palette.

By adding this snapshot of how the image appears before the effect
is applied, if I need to undo the effect after running the action on an
image, I can simply switch over to the History palette and click on the
snapshot.
I'll switch back over to my Actions palette now, and we can can see
that the first step, Make snapshot , appears in the "Soft Glow" action.
Our first step has successfully been recorded:
The first step now appears in the action.

Step 5: Duplicate The Background Layer

Now that we've given ourselves a way to quickly undo the effect if we
need to, we can begin creating it! The first thing we need to do is
duplicate the Background layer. The Background layer is the layer
that contains our original image, and currently, it's the only layer we
have. To duplicate it, go up to the Layer menu at the top of the
screen, choose New , and then choose Layer via Copy , or for a
quicker way, use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+J (Win) / Command +J
(Mac).
Either way tells Photoshop to create a duplicate of the Background
layer for us (or at least, a duplicate of whatever layer we currently
have selected, which in this case happens to be the Background
layer). If we look in the Layers palette, we can see that we now have
two layers. The original Background layer is on the bottom, and a
copy of the Background layer, with the descriptive name "Layer 1", is
sitting above it:

The duplicate of the Background layer, "Layer 1", now appears in the
Layers palette.
If we look in the Actions palette now, we can see that a second step,
Layer Via Copy , has been added to our "Soft Glow" action:
The second step, "Layer Via Copy", appears in the action.

Step 6: Rename The New Layer

Before we continue, let's rename this layer. I'm not a big fan of
generic layer names like "Layer 1", and giving layers more
meaningful names is always a good idea. To rename the layer,
double-click directly on the layer's name, type in a new name, and
then press Enter (Win) / Return (Mac) to accept it. In a moment,
we're going to be applying Photoshop's Gaussian Blur filter to this
layer, so let's name this layer "gaussian blur":

Double-click directly on the name "Layer 1" and rename the layer
"gaussian blur".
Checking our Actions palette, we can see that a third step, Set
current layer , has been added to our action. The name of the step
doesn't really tell us much, other than it sets the currently selected
layer to something, but if we twirl open the step by clicking on the
triangle to the left of its name, we can see that this step will rename
the currently selected layer to "gaussian blur", which is exactly what
we want:
The third step, "Set current layer", now appears in the action.

Step 7: Change The Blend Mode Of The New

Layer To "Overlay"
So far, even though we've recorded three steps already in our action,
the image in the document window doesn't look any different from
when we started, but that's about to change. We're going to change
the blend mode of the new layer. With the "gaussian blur" layer
selected, go up the Blend Mode option at the top of the Layers
palette. It's the drop-down box that's currently set to "Normal". Click
on the drop-down box to open it, then select the Overlay blend
mode from the list:

Change the blend mode of the "gaussian blur" layer to "Overlay".

With the blend mode of the layer set to Overlay, the image in the
document window now appears with much higher contrast and the
colors appear more saturated:
Both the contrast and color saturation have now increased in the
image.
Let's look at our Actions palette again, where we can see that we
now have a fourth step, also named Set current layer , added to our
action. Let's twirl the step open to view the details, and we can see
that this step will change the blend mode of the currently selected
layer to Overlay:

A fourth step has been added to the "Soft Glow" action.

We've successfully added our fourth step to the "Soft Glow" action.
Only a couple more steps to go, and then we'll have an effect that we
can instantly apply to any image in Photoshop, any time we want!
Step 8: Apply The "Gaussian Blur" Filter
To create the soft glow effect, we need to blur the image on our
"gaussian blur" layer. Go up to the Filter menu at the top of the
screen, choose Blur, and then choose Gaussian Blur. This will bring
up Photoshop's Gaussian Blur dialog box. Drag the Radius slider at
the bottom of the dialog box towards the right to increase the amount
of blurring that's being applied to the layer, or drag the slider to the
left to decrease the blur amount. Keep an eye on your image in the
document window as you drag the slider so you can see what's
happening, and select a radius value that gives your image a nice
soft glow effect. I'm going to set my radius value to 13 pixels, which
works nicely for my image:

Create the soft glow effect by adjusting the Radius value in the
Gaussian Blur dialog box.
Click OK when you're done to accept the blur effect and exit out of
the dialog box. Here's my image after applying the Gaussian Blur
filter:
The image after applying the Gaussian Blur filter.
If we look in our Actions palette, we can see that a fifth step,
Gaussian Blur , has been added to our "Soft Glow" action, and if we
twirl open the step, we can see from the details that the radius value
in the Gaussian Blur dialog box will automatically be set to 13 pixels
every time we run this action:

The fifth step, "Gaussian Blur", appears in the action.

That's great, but what if a radius value of 13 pixels doesn't work as
well with the next image we use with this action? What if the next
image needs an even higher radius value to achieve the desired
glow effect, or a smaller radius value? Maybe, instead of using the
same radius value each time the action is played, we should have
Photoshop pop open the Gaussian Blur dialog box for us so we can
adjust the radius value, if needed, and customize the effect for each
image.
As we've already learned, we can easily enable or disable dialog
boxes when an action plays by simply clicking on on the dialog box
toggle icon to the left of the step. By default, the toggle icons appear
empty, which means that the dialog box associated with the step will
not appear when the action plays. Since I want the Gaussian Blur
dialog box to appear each time I run the action, I'm going to click
inside the empty toggle icon to the left of the step. When I do, a
small gray dialog box icon appears, telling me that the dialog box will
now pop open for me when I play the action:

Click on the dialog box toggle icon for the Gaussian Blur step to
have Photoshop pop open the dialog box when the action plays.
Step 9: Lower The Opacity Of The Layer To 65%
To complete the action, let's lower the opacity value of the "gaussian
blur" layer so the effect isn't quite as intense. To lower the opacity of
the layer, go up to the Opacity option in the top right corner of the
Layers palette, directly across from the Blend Mode option. By
default, the opacity value is set to 100%. Click on the small arrow to
the right of where it says "100%", which will bring up a small slider
bar. Use the slider to drag the opacity value down to 65%:
Use the small slider to lower the opacity value of the "gaussian blur"
layer to 65%.
Important: As you're dragging the slider to lower the opacity of the
layer, make sure you don't release your mouse button until you've
dragged the slider to the desired value. Each time you release your
mouse button, Photoshop will consider it a new step in the action
and you'll end up with multiple steps for lowering the opacity. For
example, if you dragged the slider down to 90%, released your
mouse button, then dragged the slider to 75%, released your mouse
button, and then dragged the slider down to 65%, you'd end up with
three steps listed in the action, one lowering the opacity to 90%,
another lowering it to 75%, and finally, a third step lowering the
opacity to 65%. If this happens to you, wait until you're done
recording the action, then simply click on the extra steps you don't
need and drag them down on to the Trash Bin at the bottom of the
Actions palette to delete them.
Even More Important: Also, if you're using Photoshop CS or later,
do not use the scrubby slider to lower the opacity value of the
layer. This one, I can't stress enough. Do not use scrubby sliders
when recording actions. If you try lowering the opacity of the layer to
65% using the scrubby slider, you'll end up with 35 individual steps in
your action, each one lowering the opacity of the layer by 1%. So, no
scrubby sliders when recording actions, otherwise you'll be deleting
a lot of extra steps when you're done. Been there, done that.
Having said that, once you've lowered the opacity of the layer, you're
done recording all the steps needed for the action! Let's look in our
Actions palette, where we can see the final step, another one named
Set current layer , listed, and if we twirl the step open to view the
details, we can see that this final step will lower the opacity of the
layer to 65%:

The final step appears in the action.

Here, after lowering the layer opacity, is my image with the
completed "Soft Glow" effect:

The wedding photo with the finished "Soft Glow" effect.

Step 10: Stop Recording The Action

We're done recording our action, which means we need to tell
Photoshop to stop recording what we're doing. To do that, click on
the Stop icon at the bottom of the Actions palette:
Click on the "Stop" icon to finish recording the action.
And with that, we're done! We've successfully recorded our very first
action, and we now have an effect that we can instant apply to any
other image we want! Let's quickly make sure the action works as
expected. I'll open another image in Photoshop:

A new image opened in Photoshop.

To run the new action on the image, I'll select the "Soft Glow" action
from inside my "My Actions" set in the Actions palette, then I'll click
on the Play icon at the bottom of the palette:
Select the "Soft Glow" action, then click on the Play icon in the
Actions palette.
As soon as I click on the Play icon, Photoshop begins running
through the steps in the action, first creating a snapshot of the image
in the History palette, then duplicating the Background layer,
renaming the new layer "gaussian blur", and changing the blend
mode of the new layer to Overlay. When it reaches the step where
the Gaussian Blur filter is applied to the image, it pauses the action
and pops open the Gaussian Blur dialog box for me so I can re-
adjust the Radius value if needed:

Photoshop pauses the action and displays the Gaussian Blur dialog
box.
Notice how the radius value in the dialog box is already set to 13
pixels, since that's the value we used when we recorded the action. I
could change the value here if I wanted to, but I think 13 pixels works
well for this image, so I'll simply click OK in the top right corner of the
dialog box to accept the setting, exit out of the dialog box, and allow
Photoshop to continue running through the steps in the action.
Photoshop continues on, lowering the opacity value of the "gaussian
blur" layer to 65% for me, at which point the effect is complete, and it
was completed in a fraction of the time it would have taken me to run
through all those steps again on my own! Here is the image with the
final "Soft Glow" effect:

The "Soft Glow" effect has been easily applied to a second image
using the action.

Photoshop Actions – Editing

An Action
Now that we've finished stepping through the Photo Corners action
and we know which steps we want to change, we're ready to edit the
action! There's a couple of steps we'll need to edit in order to change
the colors the action uses, and there's also a couple of steps we can
probably get rid of altogether, or at least disable.
Whenever you're editing an action, it's always best to make a copy
of the action first and edit the copy , rather than editing the
original. This way, you'll always have the original if you need it. Also,
since the action we want to edit is found in one of the action sets that
installed with Photoshop (in this case, the Frames action set), it's a
good idea for us to create a new action set and then place the copy
of our action inside the new set, rather than making changes to any
of Photoshop's default settings.
Download our tutorials as print-ready PDFs!
Creating A New Action Set
The first thing we need to do, then, is create a new action set. As
we've already learned, an action set is really just a folder of sorts
that actions are stored in. It's important to note that all actions must
be placed inside action sets . If you create a new action, or make a
copy of an existing action, it must be placed inside an action set. You
can have a single action in a set or hundreds of actions, it makes no
difference. All actions must be placed in an action set. I know, it's a
rule and no one likes rules, but there's just no getting around this
one.
The easiest way to create a new action set is to click on the New
Action Set icon at the bottom of the Actions palette (it's the icon that
looks like a folder):

Click on the New Action Set icon to create a new action set.
Photoshop will pop up the New Set dialog box where you can enter a
name for your new action set. I'll name my action set "My Actions".
Of course, you can name your set whatever you like:

Enter a name for your new action set in the New Set dialog box.
Click OK once you've entered a name for your set to exit out of the
dialog box. If I look at my Actions palette now, I can see my new
action set, "My Actions", listed below the other action sets:
The new action set appears in the Actions palette.
At the moment, we have a new action set with absolutely nothing in
it. Let's make a copy of the Photo Corners action, which is inside the
Frames set, and place it into our new set.

Moving Action Sets Inside The Actions Palette

To place a copy of the Photo Corners action inside my new "My
Actions" set, I'm simply going to drag the action from the Frames set
into the "My Actions" set while holding down my Alt (Win) / Option
(Mac) key, which will create a copy of the action set as I drag. To
make it easier to drag the action from one set into the other, I'm first
going to move the "My Actions" set above the Frames set. To move
action sets around and reposition them inside the Actions palette,
simply click on an action set, then keep your mouse button held
down and drag the set to its new position. Here, I'm dragging the "My
Actions" set to its new location directly between the Image Effects
and Frames sets. Notice the black horizontal line that appears
between them indicating where the action set will be placed:

Click and drag action sets up or down in the Actions palette to

reposition them.
Release your mouse button to drop the set into its new location:
The "My Actions" set is now sitting between the Image Effects and
Frames sets.

Copying And Dragging An Action From One Set

To Another
With my "My Actions" set now moved into place, I'll twirl open the
Frames set and click on the Photo Corners action to select it. I'm
going to drag this action from the Frames set into the "My Actions"
set, but I don't want to move the original action. I want to create a
copy of the original and move the copy into the "My Actions" set
while leaving the original alone. To move the action and create a
copy of it at the same time, I'll hold down my Alt (Win) / Option (Mac)
key and drag the Photo Corners action into the "My Actions" set.
Once again, a black horizontal line appears indicating where the
action will be placed:

Holding down "Alt" (Win) / "Option" (Mac) and dragging the Photo
Corners action into the "My Actions" set.
I'll release my mouse button, and I now have a copy of the action,
which Photoshop has named "Photo Corners copy", in the "My
Actions" set:
A copy of the action, named "Photo Corners copy", has been placed
inside the "My Actions" set.
Renaming An Action
"Photo Corners copy" doesn't seem like a very interesting name to
me, and certainly not very descriptive. Since I'm hoping to improve
on this action by editing it, I think I'll rename it to something like
"Improved Photo Corners". To rename an action, simply double-click
directly on its name in the Actions palette and type in a new name.
Press Enter (Win) / Return (Mac) when you're done:

Double-click directly on the name of an action and enter a new name

to rename it.
I now have an exact copy of the original Photo Corners action, which
I've renamed "Improved Photo Corners", sitting in the new "My
Actions" set that I created. We can now make any changes we want
to this action without affecting either the original action or the Frames
action set.

Deleting A Step In An Action

Let's begin editing our "Improved Photo Corners" action. The first
thing I'm going to do is delete the very first step, "Make snapshot". If
you recall, this step takes a snapshot of the state of the image just
before the action is played so that we can easily undo the action by
simply clicking on the snapshot in the History palette. I'll click on this
step to select it:

Selecting the "Make snapshot" step.

Since I'll most likely be running this action on an image immediately
after opening it in Photoshop, I don't think there's really any need for
a snapshot since I could just as easily select the Revert option from
the File menu at the top of the screen to revert the image back to the
way it appeared when I opened it. I'll just go ahead then and delete
this step. To delete a step in an action, all you need to do is click on
it and drag it down on to the Trash Bin icon at the bottom of the
Actions palette:

To delete a step, click on it and drag it down on to the Trash Bin at

the bottom of the Actions palette.
The "Make snapshot" step has now been deleted:
The step has been deleted.
I'm also going to delete the "Reset Swatches" step from the action,
since we won't be needing that one either. Another way to delete a
step is to click on it in the Actions palette to select then, then hold
down your Alt (Win) / Option (Mac) key and simply click on the Trash
Bin icon at the bottom of the palette:

Click on a step to select it, then hold down "Alt" (Win) / "Option"
(Mac) and click on the Trash Bin to delete it.
If you click on the Trash Bin without holding down Alt/Option,
Photoshop pops up a dialog box first asking if you want to delete the
step. Holding down Alt/Option avoids the dialog box.

Turning Steps On And Off

Sometimes, rather than deleting a step entirely, you'll simply want
Photoshop to ignore it. This is usually a better alternative than
deleting a step unless you know for certain that the step is not and
will not ever be needed. The Actions palette gives us a way to turn
individual steps off without deleting them by clicking on the small
checkmark to the left of a step. With the checkmark visible, the step
will be played as part of the action. When you click on a checkmark,
it disappears leaving an empty box in its place and the step will be
ignored.
If I look at my action in the Actions palette, I can see that the first
step is now "Convert Mode", which, if you remember from our step-
by-step journey through the Photo Corners action, converts the
image into the RGB color mode. The reason this step is included is
because not all of Photoshop's commands, filters and other options
are available to us when working on an image in a different color
mode like CMYK or Lab. Also, colors can appear differently when
working in these other modes, especially CMYK. However, since the
chances are very high that any image we're working on in Photoshop
will already be in the RGB color mode, this step can usually be
skipped. Of course, there's always the chance that you'll be working
on an image in a different color mode, so rather than deleting the
step completely, let's just turn it off.
To turn off the "Convert Mode" step and tell Photoshop to skip it until
I decide to turn it back on again, I'll simply click on the checkmark to
the left of the step. The checkmark will disappear, leaving an empty
square in its place:

Turn individual steps on and off by clicking on the checkmark to the

left of a step. The step is turned off when the checkmark is not
visible.
The next time I run this action, Photoshop will ignore the "Convert
Mode" step and carry on with the rest of the action. To turn a step
back on, just click inside the empty square to make the checkmark
visible once again.

Turn All Steps On Or Off At Once

If you want to turn every step in an action on or off at once, simply
click on the checkmark to the left of the action's name in the Actions
palette. When the checkmark is red, as it is at the moment, it means
that some of the steps in the action are currently turned on while
others are turned off. In our case, the "Convert Mode" step is turned
off while all other steps are turned on. When the checkmark is gray, it
means that all of the steps are currently turned on. And when the
checkmark is not visible, it means that all of the steps in the action
are currently turned off:
The main checkmark to the left of the action's name is red, which
means that some of the steps are turned on while others are turned
off.

Changing An Existing Step In An Action

We've seen how to delete a step from an action, as well as how to
temporarily turn steps on or off. Now let's look at how to change a
step. Before we do, it's important to note that unfortunately, not all
steps in an action can be easily changed. If a step involves setting
options in a dialog box, which is what we'll be looking at here, then
yes, you can make changes to the step by changing the options in
the dialog box. If not, you'll need to delete the step, then re-record it.
We'll see how to add steps to an action once we've looked at how to
make changes to a step that uses a dialog box.
There's two steps in this action that I want to change. Both are
named "Fill", and both control the colors used in the frame effect. If
you recall from when we played through the action one step at a
time , the first Fill step controls the color used for the background.
Let's look at this step again. I'll twirl it open so we can view the
details:

The details of the first Fill step in the action which controls the
background color.
At the moment, this step will fill the "new background" layer with
gray, using Photoshop's Fill command. I wasn't too happy with the
gray that it used, so I want to choose a different color. Now, I have a
couple of choices here. I can specify an exact color to use every time
I run the action, or I can tell Photoshop to bring up the Fill
command's dialog box when it plays the action so I can choose a
different color each time. Let's try choosing a specific color first.
To edit a step in an action (again, this only works for steps that
involve dialog boxes), simply double-click on the step in the Actions
palette. I'll double-click directly on the Fill step, and as soon as I do,
Photoshop pops up the Fill dialog box and we can see that it's
currently set to fill the layer with 50% gray, which is the shade of gray
midway between black and white:

Double-click on a step to bring up its dialog box.

I think I want to use white for my background color with this frame
effect, so I'll select White from the drop-down box instead:

Changing the "Use" option to "White" in the Fill dialog box.

I'll click OK in the dialog box to accept the change and exit out of it,
but as soon as I do, Photoshop actually plays the step and fills my
document window with white:
Photoshop plays the step after making changes.
To undo the step that Photoshop has played, all I need to do is go up
to the Edit menu at the top of the screen and choose Undo (in this
case, it will say Undo Fill ), or I can use the keyboard shortcut,
Ctrl+Z (Win) / Command+Z (Mac). Either way takes me back to the
way the image looked before the step was played.
And now, if I look at the details of the step in the Actions palette, I
can see that the layer will no longer be filled with gray. Instead, it will
be filled with white:

The details of the step have now changed in the Actions palette.
I'm going to do the same thing with the second Fill step, which
controls the color used for the actual photo corners. I'll scroll down to
it in the Actions palette, then twirl it open so we can see the details:
The second Fill step controls the color of the four photo corners.
As we see by looking at the details of the step, it's currently set to fill
the four photo corners with the background color. We've already
deleted the "Reset Swatches" step which would have reset the
background color to white, so let's set a specific color to use. I'll
double-click on the step in the Actions palette to edit it, and the Fill
dialog box pops up once again, this time set to use the current
background color:

The Fill command is currently set to fill the four photo corners with
the background color.
This time, I think I'll choose black as the color for my photo corners,
so I'll select Black from the list:

Selecting black as the color to use for the photo corners.

I'll click OK to accept the change and exit out of the dialog box, and
once again, Photoshop plays the step, filling my document window
with black:
The document window now appears filled with black.
I'll undo the step that Photoshop played using the keyboard shortcut
Ctrl+Z (Win) / Command+Z (Mac), and now if I look at the details of
the step in the Actions palette, I can see that the photo corners will
now be filled with black instead of the background color:

The details of the step now show that black will be used instead of
the background color.
Let's play the action now and see what it looks like with our new
colors! I'll use a different photo this time just to keep things
interesting. To play the action, I'll click on it in the Actions palette to
select it and then click on the Play icon at the bottom of the palette:

Selecting and playing the newly edited action.

Here's the image after running the Improved Photo Corners frame
effect action. Notice how the background is now white and the photo
corners are black thanks to the changes we made:

The photo after running the new Improved Photo Corners frame
effect action.
I would say that's a definite improvement over the colors used by the
original Photo Corners action. But what if I don't always want white
as my background color and black as the color of the photo corners?
Do I have to make a new copy of the action and edit it each time I
want different colors? Of course not! We'll just tell Photoshop to pop
open the Fill dialog boxes for us so we can choose a new color each
time the action plays!

Toggling Dialog Boxes On And Off In An Action

As we've already learned from back when we were looking at
Photoshop's Default Actions set , the Actions palette gives us the
ability to have dialog boxes pop open for us as an action plays. This
gives us a chance to customize the action on the fly each time we
run it. In our case here, even though we've already seen how to edit
the colors in the action and select new ones, it would be great if we
could choose different colors for our Improved Photo Corners action
each time we ran it, and we can certainly do that. All we need to do
is toggle the dialog boxes on for our two Fill steps.
To tell Photoshop to pop open the dialog box when it reaches a
certain step, simply click on the dialog box toggle icon to the left of
the step. In my case, I want the Fill dialog box to appear when the
action plays so I can choose a color for the background, so I'll click
on the dialog box toggle icon to the left of the first Fill step:

Toggling the dialog box on for the first Fill step in the action.
I'll scroll down to the second Fill step and do the same thing:

Toggling the dialog box on for the second Fill step in the action.
Now watch what happens when I play the action. First, I'll revert my
photo back to its original state by going up to the File menu and
choosing Revert . Now I'll select the action in the Actions palette and
click on the Play icon. Photoshop begins running through the steps
in the action as usual until it reaches the first Fill step. Here, instead
of automatically filling the background layer with white, it pops open
the Fill dialog box for me, allowing me to either accept white as the
color to use or choose a different color:
The Fill dialog box appears when Photoshop reaches the first Fill
step.
One of my favorite ways to customize effects is to sample colors
directly from the image I'm working on, and I think I'll do that here. I'll
sample a color from the photo to use as the background color for the
frame effect. To do that, I'll choose Color from the drop-down list in
the Fill dialog box:

Selecting "Color" from the drop-down list.

This will bring up Photoshop's Color Picker . Rather than choosing
a color from the Color Picker though, I'm going to move my mouse
cursor over the image, which turns the cursor into the Eyedropper,
and I'll click on the image to sample a light bluish-gray color from the
bride's veil:
Sampling a color directly from the image to use as the background
color for the frame effect.
I'll click OK to exit out of the Color Picker, then I'll click OK to exit out
of the Fill dialog box. Photoshop fills the "new background" layer with
the color I've sampled from the image and then continues on its way
through the steps in the action until it reaches the second Fill step.
Here, it pauses and pops open the Fill dialog box once again,
allowing me to either accept black as the color to use for the photo
corners or choose a different color:
The Fill dialog box opens once again when Photoshop reaches the
second Fill step in the action.
I'm going to sample another color directly from the image to use for
the photo corners, so I'll select Color from the drop-down list in the
Fill dialog box. Once again, this brings up Photoshop's Color Picker,
but I'm not going to use it. Instead, I'll move my mouse cursor over
the image and sample a darker gray color, also from the bride's veil:
Sampling a second color from the image, this time for the photo
corners.
I'll click OK to exit out of the Color Picker, then I'll click OK to exit out
of the Fill dialog box. Photoshop fills the four photo corners with the
dark gray I sampled from the image, then continues on through the
remainder of the steps in the action until it reaches the end. Here is
my new "Improved Photo Corners" result using the colors sampled
directly from the photo:

The same Improved Photo Corners frame effect, this time with colors
sampled from the image.
I think that looks pretty good. And now that the action will allow me to
choose new colors every time I run it, I can easily customize this
frame effect action for any photo I use it with!
There's only one more thing we need to look at before moving on to
recording our own actions, and that's how to add a step to an action.
We'll do that next!

Adding A New Step To An Action

As I mentioned, Photoshop allows us to make changes to an existing
step in an action only when the step involves using a dialog box to
set various options. By double-clicking directly on the step, we tell
Photoshop to pop the dialog box open for us so we can make
changes, and then we simply close the dialog box when we're done.
If the step we need to change does not use a dialog box, the only
way we can edit it is by deleting the step and then re-recording it.
We've already looked at how to delete a step from an action, which
is easily done by dragging it down on to the Trash Bin at the bottom
of the Actions palette. Here, we'll look at how to add a step to an
action.
Remember when we stepped through the original Photo Corners
action? The very first step in the action was "Make snapshot", which
took a snapshot of the state of the image just before the action was
played and saved it in the History palette. This way, we could quickly
undo all the steps in the action if needed by switching over to the
History palette and clicking on the snapshot. After we dragged a
copy of the action, which we renamed "Improved Photo Corners",
into our new "My Actions" set so we could edit it, the first thing we
did was delete that "Make snapshot" step. My reasoning for deleting
the step at the time was that I would most likely be running the action
on a newly opened image in Photoshop, and since we can easily
revert an image back to the way it looked when we opened it (or at
least to the way it looked when we last saved it) by going up to the
File menu and choosing Revert, I didn't think the "Make snapshot"
step was necessary, so I deleted it.
Well, as is often the case, it's not until you've tossed something away
that you realize how much it really meant to you. After a bit more
thought, I realize now that deleting that step was a mistake. What if I
wanted to run the "Improved Photo Corners" action on an image that
I had already done a considerable amount of photo retouching work
on? Sure, I could save the image first before running the action, but
what if I forgot to save it first? If I tried to undo the action by selecting
Revert from the File menu, not only would I be undoing all the steps
in the action, I'd also be undoing everything else I had done to the
image! Suddenly, having that "Make snapshot" step there doesn't
sound like such a bad idea. But what to do? I've already deleted it!
Do I have to re-record the entire action again, or edit another copy of
the original just to get that one step back? Thankfully, no. All I need
to do is re-record that one step.
To add a step to an action, the first thing we need to do is select the
step that comes just before the spot where we need to insert the
step. For example, if the step you're adding needs to be the third
step in the action, click on the second step in the action to select it
before you begin recording. This way, when you record the new step,
Photoshop will automatically place it immediately after the step you
had selected. Keep in mind that you'll most likely need to play all the
steps in the action up to that point in order to add the new step,
otherwise Photoshop may not understand what you're trying to do
and will throw you an error message, which makes sense. After all, if
you tried telling someone to "turn left at the next intersection" while
the two of you are still standing beside the car deciding where to go
for lunch, they probably won't have any idea what you're talking
about and may start wondering if going anywhere at all with you is
such a good idea.
Remember, to play steps in an action one at a time, hold down your
Ctrl (Win) / Command (Mac) key and double-click on each step.
You'll probably need to do this from the beginning of the action until
you reach the point where you want to insert your new step.
In my case, I have a bit of a problem. I want to insert a new step at
the very beginning of the action, which means, obviously, that there
are no steps that come before it for me to select, and that means
there's no way for me to have Photoshop automatically place my
new step at the beginning of the action. No worries though, since we
can easily rearrange the order of the steps, as we'll see in a
moment. For now, I'll simply select the step that's currently the first
step, "Convert Mode":

Selecting the first step in the action.

To record a new step, simply click on the Record icon at the bottom
of the Actions palette:
Click the Record icon to begin recording your new step.
You'll see the little "button" turn red, letting you know that you're now
in Record mode:

The record button turns red when in Record mode.

Now, remember what we said at the very beginning . There's no
reason to panic just because the little record button is red. Yes, we're
technically in Record mode, but we can take as much time as we
want recording our step because actions are not recorded in real
time. All Photoshop records are the steps themselves. I want to have
the action take a snapshot of my image before any further steps are
run, so with Photoshop recording what I'm doing, I'm going to switch
over to my History palette , which by default is sitting right next to
the Actions palette, and I'll click on the New Snapshot icon at the
bottom of the palette (it's the icon that looks like a camera):
Clicking on the "New Snapshot" icon at the bottom of the History
palette.
This adds a snapshot of the current state of my image to the top of
the History palette:

The History palette showing the new snapshot.

I'll switch back over to my Actions palette now, and we can see that
a new step named "Make snapshot" has been added directly below
the "Convert Mode" step, which is the step I selected before clicking
the Record icon:

A new "Make snapshot" step now appears below the "Convert

Mode" step.
I've finished recording my step, so I can now stop recording. To do
that, I'll click on the Stop icon to the left of the Record icon:

Click on the Stop icon to finish recording the step.

And there we go! I've successfully added a new "Make snapshot"
step to my "Improved Photo Corners" action. The only problem is
that I want this new step to be the first step in the action, and at the
moment, it's the second step. Let's fix that.

Changing The Order Of Steps In An Action

To change the order of steps in an action, simply click on a step to
select it, then drag into into place. I want to move my "Make
snapshot" step above the "Convert Mode" step, so I'll click on it to
select it in the Actions palette, then I'll drag it up above the "Convert
Mode" step. Notice the black horizontal line that appears where I'm
about to drop the step:

Simply click and drag steps above or below each other in the Actions
palette if you need to change their order.
I'll release my mouse button to drop the step into its new position,
and we can see that it now appears as the very first step in the
action, right where I wanted it:

The "Make snapshot" step has been successfully moved into place.

Photoshop Actions – Stepping

Through An Action
We've covered a lot of information so far in our look at Photoshop
actions . We've learned what an action is and that actions are stored
in action sets. We've looked at the Actions palette and the palette
menu. We've explored the default actions that Photoshop
automatically loads for us, and we've seen how to load the additional
action sets that install with Photoshop. We know that Photoshop can
run through an entire action from beginning to end completely on its
own, or it can pop open dialog boxes which give us the chance to
change various command options and settings to better suit the
image we're working on. And we've learned how to twirl open an
action in the Actions palette so we can view the specific steps
involved, right down to the details of each step.
Download our tutorials as print-ready PDFs!
A moment ago, we ran the Photo Corners action, which is found in
the Frames action set, on an image and we ended up with a very
basic photo corners effect. I wasn't too thrilled with the colors that the
action used, though, so I'd like to edit the action and choose different
colors. To do that, I'll first need to figure out which steps in the action
are responsible for setting the colors it uses.
We've already learned how to view the individual steps, as well as
the details of those steps, in the Actions palette, but an even better
way of figuring out exactly what's going on with an action is to take
the action one step at a time. And when I say "take" it one step at a
time, I mean "play" it one step at a time! You simply start at the
beginning of the action and play each step individually while keeping
an eye on your image and on the Layers palette to see what just
happened!
Unfortunately, Adobe didn't include an obvious way of stepping
through an action like this. There is no "Play Single Step" button
anywhere to be found. To play a single step in an action, hold down
your Ctrl (Win) / Command (Mac) key on your keyboard and double-
click on the step in the Actions palette. This will play the step you
double-clicked on and advance you to the next step in the Actions
palette. If you keep an eye on your image and on the Layers palette,
you'll be able to see exactly what's happening. Let's work our way
through the Photo Corners action one step at a time to see exactly
how Photoshop creates the frame effect and to learn which steps
we'll need to edit to change the colors it uses. This also gives us a
chance to see what sort of things we can record as part of an action,
although there's lots more we can do than what we'll find here.
Before I begin, I'm going to revert my image back to its original state
by going up to the File menu at the top of the screen and choosing
Revert:

Select the Revert command from the File menu to revert an image to
its original or previously saved state.
This returns my photo back to the way it looked before running the
action:

The photo is now back to its original state.

If I look in my Layers palette, I can see that I'm back to having only
one layer, the Background layer, which contains my image:
The Layers palette showing the original image on the Background
layer.

Step 1: Make snapshot

Let's begin working our way through the Photo Corners action one
step at a time so we can see exactly what Photoshop is doing. With
the Photo Corners action twirled open in the Actions palette, I'll hold
down my Ctrl (Win) / Command (Mac) key on the keyboard and
double-click on the very first step, Make snapshot:

Hold down Ctrl (Win) / Command (Mac) and double-click on the first
step in the action to play it.
The "Make snapshot" step takes a snapshot of the current state of
the image and places it in the History palette . This way, if we want
to revert back to the way the image looked immediately before
running the action, we can simply switch over to the History palette
and click on the snapshot. After playing this step, switch to your
History palette for a moment. You'll see the snapshot, named
"Snapshot 1", at the top of the palette:
A snapshot of the current state of the image now appears in the
History palette.
Step 2: Convert Mode
Switch back to your Actions palette when you're done. Let's move on
to the second step in the action, Convert Mode. I can't really tell just
from the name of this step what it's going to do, so I'll twirl it open to
view the details:

Viewing the details of the second step in the Photo Corners action.
With the details of the step visible, I can see that all this second step
does is converts the image to the RGB color mode. Well, my image
is already in the RGB color mode, and yours probably is, too, so this
second step isn't really necessary. I'm going to skip it for now, but
later, when we go to actually edit the action, we'll learn how to turn
individual steps on and off.
Step 3: Duplicate current layer
The third step in the Photo Corners action is Duplicate current layer.
I'll select the step, then twirl it open so we can view the details:
The details of the "Duplicate current layer" step.
It looks like this third step in the action is going to create a duplicate
of the Background layer (since the Background layer is our only layer
at the moment), and it's going to name the new layer "photo
corners". Let's see what happens. I'll hold down Ctrl (Win) /
Command (Mac) and double-click on the step to play it. If I look in
my Layers palette after playing the step, I can see that I now have
two layers. The new layer (the one on top) is a duplicate of the
Background layer, and Photoshop named it "photo corners", exactly
as we expected:

The copy of the Background layer named "photo corners" now

appears in the Layers palette.

Step 4: Transform current layer

As we make our way through the individual steps of the Photo
Corners action, we come to the fourth step, Transform current layer.
I'll twirl open the step in the Actions palette and with the details now
visible, it looks like this step is going to use Photoshop's Transform
command to scale the image on the "photo corners" layer down to
95% of it's original size:
Viewing the details of the fourth step in the Photo Corners action.
I'll play the step by Ctrl+double-clicking (Win) / Command+double-
clicking (Mac) on it, and while nothing appears to have happened in
the Layers palette, I can see if I look at my document window that
the image on the "photo corners" layer has in fact been made
smaller, while the original image below it on the Background layer
remains full size:

The image on the "photo corners" layer has been scaled down to
95% its original size.
So far, no sign of the step that controls the colors in the frame effect,
but we're getting a good sense of how the action was put together.
Let's carry on.

Step 5: Make layer

We're working our way through the Photo Corners action in
Photoshop by playing each step individually from beginning to end,
looking for the steps that control the colors the action uses so we
can edit them, and we're getting a good idea of how actions work.
The fifth step in the action is Make layer , and if I twirl it open to view
the details, we can see that a new blank layer is going to be created
and given the name "new background":

The fifth step should create a new blank layer named "new
background".
I'll play the step by once again holding down Ctrl (Win) / Command
(Mac) and double-clicking on the step in the Actions palette, and a
quick look at the Layers palette shows us that we do in fact now
have a new blank layer above the other two, and this new layer has
been named "new background":

A new blank layer named "new background" appears at the top of

the layer stack.
Step 6: Fill
Moving along through the Photo Corners action, we come to the
sixth step, Fill. This one looks interesting. I know that Photoshop's
Fill command is used to fill layers or selections with color, and if I
twirl open the action to view the details, it looks like this step is going
to fill our new layer with gray. I think we've found the first step that
controls color in the action!

The sixth step in the action appears to fill the new layer with gray.
Let's play the step by holding down Ctrl (Win) / Command (Mac) and
double-clicking on it to see what happens. Sure enough, the "new
background" layer becomes filled with gray. Since the "new
background" layer is currently above the other two layers in the
Layers palette, it blocks the two layers below it from view and our
entire document window appears as solid gray:

The "new background" layer is now filled with solid gray.

We now know that this is the step we'll need to edit to change the
color used for the background in the Photo Corners frame effect!
Let's keep going.

Step 7: Move current layer

The seventh step in our action is Move current layer . "Current
layer" refers to the currently selected layer, and since our currently
selected layer is the "new background" layer that was filled with gray
a moment ago, the name of this step makes it fairly obvious that the
"new background" layer is about to be moved to a new location in
the Layers palette. If we twirl open the step to view the details, we
can see that it will be moved into the "layer 1" position, which will
place it directly above the Background layer:

The seventh step in the action looks like it will move the "new
background" layer directly above the Background layer in the Layers
palette.
I'll play the step by Ctrl+double-clicking (Win) / Command+double-
clicking (Mac) on it, and we can see now in the Layers palette that
the "new background" layer has swapped positions with the "photo
corners" layer, making the "photo corners" layer now the top-most
layer in the layer stack:

The "new background" and "photo corners" layers have now

swapped positions in the Layers palette.
Since the "photo corners" layer is now at the top of the layer stack,
the image on the layer is now visible in front of the gray background
in the document window:
The image on the "photo corners" layer is now visible in front of the
gray background.

Step 8: Select layer "photo corners"

The Photo Corners frame effect is beginning to take shape. Step 8 in
the action is a simple one, Select layer "photo corners" . This step
is so straightforward, in fact, that there are no extra details for us to
view which is why the step doesn't have a twirly triangle beside its
name. This step should simply select the "photo corners" layer in the
Layers palette:

Step 8 in the Photo Corners action is a simple one.

I'll hold down Ctrl (Win) / Command (Mac) and double-click on it to
play it, and we see in the Layers palette that the "photo corners"
layer is now selected:
The "photo corners" layer is now selected after playing the step.

Step 9: Make layer

The ninth step in the action is Make layer . Since the fifth step in our
Photo Corners action was also named "Make layer", we know from
what we saw in Step 5 that this step is going to create a new blank
layer for us. By default, new layers are added directly above the
currently selected layer, and since the "photo corners" layer was
selected in the previous step, this new layer will be placed directly
above it, which will position it at the very top of the layer stack. If we
twirl open the step to view the details, we can see that the new layer
will be named "4 corners":

The ninth step in the action should create a new blank layer named
"4 corners" directly above the "photo corners" layer.
I'll Ctrl+double-click (Win) / Command+double-click (Mac) on the
step to play it, and the Layers palette now shows us a new blank
layer named "4 corners" directly above the "photo corners" layer:
A new blank layer named "4 corners" appears above the "photo
corners" layer in the Layers palette.
Steps 10 - 13: Creating The Selections For The
Photo Corners
As we make our way through the Photo Corners action in the Actions
palette, we come to step 10, Set Selection. This step, along with the
three Add To Selection steps that follow it, creates a triangular
selection in one of the four corners of the photo. To save us a little
time, and as an opportunity to show you a little trick for playing
several actions at once, I'm going to select the first step, "Set
Selection", then I'll hold down my Shift key and click on the third
"Add To Selection" step (step 13), which will select all four steps at
once in the Actions palette:

To select multiple steps in a row, click on the top one, then Shift-click
on the bottom one.
To tell Photoshop to play all four steps one after the other once you
have them selected, simply click on the Play icon at the bottom of
the Actions palette:
Click the Play icon to have Photoshop play all four steps.
If we look at the image in the document window now, we can see a
triangular-shaped selection in each of the four corners of the photo:

A triangular selection now appears in each corner of the photo.

The only minor downside to playing several steps at once like this is
that Photoshop doesn't automatically advance you to the next step in
the action when it's done, so you'll need to click on the next step
yourself to select it. Not a huge deal, but worth mentioning anyway.

Step 14: Reset Swatches

Arriving at step 14, Reset Swatches , we find another step that
seems to have something to do with color in the action. This step,
which again is so straightforward that no additional details are
needed in the Actions palette, resets the Foreground and
Background colors to their defaults, with black becoming the
foreground color and white as the background color:

The "Reset Swatches" step will reset the Foreground and

Background colors to their defaults.
I'll hold down Ctrl (Win) / Command (Mac) and double-click on the
step to play it, and we can see if we look at the Foreground and
Background color swatches in the Tools palette that the foreground
color (the left swatch) is now set to black while the background color
(the right swatch) is set to white:

The Foreground and Background color swatches in the Tools palette.

Your foreground and background colors may have already been set
to the default colors before playing this step. In fact, we may not
even need this step, so it may end up being one we can delete, or at
least turn off, when we go to edit the action later.

Step 15: Fill

Step 15 in the Photo Corners action brings us to another step named
Fill . If you recall, the sixth step in the action was also a Fill step, and
it filled the "new background" layer with gray. Let's twirl open this
step to see the details:
Viewing the details of step 16 in the Photo Corners action.
It looks like this time, we'll be filling those four triangular selections
we just made with our current background color, which explains why
we reset the foreground and background colors in the previous step.
Since our background color is now set to white, the four selections
will be filled with white. I'll play the step (I think we all know how to
play the step at this point so I won't bother explaining how), and if we
look at the image in the document window, we can see that the four
selections are now filled with white, giving us the photo corners:

The selections in the four corners of the image are now filled with
white.
Okay! We've found the steps that control the colors used in the
action! We now know which steps to edit. Two of the steps are
named "Fill", with the first one controlling the color of the background
and the second setting the color for the photo corners themselves.
We also found a couple of steps that are probably not needed, with
one converting our image to the RGB color mode and the other
resetting our foreground and background colors. Let's quickly finish
making our way through this action so we can see a few more
examples of the kinds of things you can record with an action, and
then we'll go about editing our own custom version!

Step 16: Set Selection

We're almost at the end of our step-by-step journey through the
Photo Corners action in Photoshop. Set 16 is Set Selection, and if
we twirl it open to view the details, we see that it tells Photoshop to
set the selection to "none":

To select multiple steps in a row, click on the top one, then Shift-click
on the bottom one.
What the heck does that mean, setting a selection to none? Well, as
you may have noticed, the language Photoshop uses to describe the
details of steps in the Actions palette isn't always so easy to follow.
Setting a selection to "none" is Photoshop's way of telling us that it's
going to deselect the selection. You'll find yourself getting better and
better at translating Photoshop-speak as you gain more experience
with using actions. I'll play the step, and when I do, the four selection
outlines disappear in the document window:
The four selection outlines have now disappeared.

Step 17: Select layer "photo corners"

Moving along, we come to step 17, Select layer "photo corners",
which is another one of those straightforward steps that doesn't
require any additional details. It will simply select the "photo corners"
layer in the Layers palette:

Step 17 will make the "photo corners" layer active.

I'll play the step, and we can see in the Layers palette that the "photo
corners" layer is now highlighted in blue, telling us that it's selected:
The "photo corners" layer is now selected in the Layers palette.
Step 18: Set Layer Styles of current layer
With only a few steps remaining in the action, we come to step 18,
Set Layer Styles of current layer. As you can probably tell from the
name of the step, this one adds a layer style, or styles, to the
currently selected layer. Layer styles can easily be recorded as part
of actions. In this case, if we twirl open the step to view the details,
we can see that we're about to add a drop shadow to the image on
the "photo corners" layer. The settings that will be used with the drop
shadow are also included for us, with a Distance of 2 pixels and a
Size of 4 pixels :

Layer Styles are one of the many things that can be recorded as part
of an action.
After playing the step, we can see a slight drop shadow effect added
to the image on the "photo corners" layer, although it's a bit hard to
see in the screenshot since it's such a subtle effect:
A subtle drop shadow has been added to the image on the "photo
corners" layer.

Step 19: Select layer "4 corners"

Only three more steps to go. Step 19 is Select layer "4 corners" ,
another simple step with no additional details needed:

Step 19 will select the "4 corners" layer in the Layers palette.
This step will select the "4 corners" layer in the Layers palette, and
when I play it, we can see that the "4 corners" layer is now selected:
The Layers palette showing the "4 corners" layer now selected.

Step 20: Set Layer Styles of current layer

With just two steps left to go, the second last step in the Photo
Corners action looks very similar to step 18 which we looked at a
moment ago. It's also named Set Layer Styles of current layer ,
which again tells us that our currently selected layer (the "4 corners"
layer) is about to have one or more layer styles applied to it. This
time, it will be a Bevel and Emboss style, with the Highlight Opacity
option set to 100%, Style set to inner bevel, and Depth set to 2
pixels:

A Bevel and Emboss layer style will be applied to the "4 corners"
layer.
I'll play the action, and if we look at the image in the document
window, we can see that the four white photo corners, which are
sitting on the "4 corners" layer, now have a subtle inner bevel effect
applied to them, giving the effect a bit of depth:
The four photo corners now have an inner bevel effect applied to
them.

Step 21: Merge Layers

We've arrived at the final step in the action. Step 21 is Merge Layers
, another step which needs no further details. It will simply merge the
"4 corners" layer, which is our currently selected layer, with the
"photo corners" layer directly below it:

The final step in the Photo Corners action is "Merge Layers".

I'll play the step to complete the action, and we can see that the "4
corners" layer has disappeared from the Layers palette now that it's
been merged with the "photo corners" layer, which is now the top-
most layer in the layer stack:
The "4 corners" layer has now been merged with the "photo corners"
layer in the Layers palette.

Photoshop Actions – The Built-

In Action Sets
If the dozen or so actions that make up the Default Actions set in
Photoshop (or the Sample Actions set in Photoshop CS2, as we
looked at previously) have you hungry for more, you'll be happy to
know that there's lots more where that came from. And when I say
"where that came from", I mean it quite literally. Photoshop's default
actions are just a sample of all the actions that install with
Photoshop, which explains why they're called "Sample Actions" in
Photoshop CS2. Photoshop ships with several other action sets, and
every action we find in the Default Actions set is taken from one of
these other sets.
Each of these additional action sets can be found at the bottom of
the Actions palette's menu. In Photoshop CS3, click on the menu
icon in the top right corner of the Actions palette. In Photoshop CS2
and earlier, click on the small, right-pointing arrow in the top right
corner of the Actions palette. The menu for the Actions palette will
appear, and if we look down at the very bottom of the menu, we can
see the additional action sets, with names like Commands , Frames
, Image Effects , Text Effects , and so on:
Additional action sets are found at the bottom of the Actions palette's
menu.

Loading An Additional Action Set

To load any of these additional action sets into Photoshop, simply
click on the name of the set. As soon as you click on the name, you'll
see the action set appear in the Actions palette below the Default
Actions set. For example, I'll click on the Image Effects set:

Click on the name of an action set to select it.

When I do, the Image Effects action set appears in my Actions
palette directly below the Default Actions set. I'll click on the triangle
to the left of the action set's name to twirl it up so we can see all of
the image effects actions inside the set:

The Image Effects action set is now loaded into Photoshop.

As you can probably guess by the name of the action set, each of
these actions contains the steps necessary to create various image
effects when you play them. If you've spent some time with
Photoshop's default actions, you may have already noticed that
some of the actions in the Image Effects set, like the "Sepia Toning
(layer)", "Quadrant Colors", and "Gradient Map" actions, are also
included in the Default Actions set. As I mentioned previously, that's
because the default actions are just a small sample of all of the
actions that Photoshop comes with.

Playing An Action You've Loaded Into The

Actions Palette
To play any of the actions you've loaded into Photoshop, simply
select the action by clicking on it, then click on the Play icon at the
bottom of the Actions palette. Here I have an image that I think
would look good with a sepia tone effect:

A photo of an old car opened in Photoshop.

One of the actions included in the Image Effects set (and also in the
Default Actions set) is Sepia Toning (layer) , which will
automatically add a sepia effect to my image for me. As I mentioned
previously, the reason the word "layer" is included after the name of
the action is simply to let us know that the effect will be applied to
whichever layer we currently have selected. If I look in my Layers
palette, I can see that I only have one layer at the moment, the
Background layer which holds my photo, so there's no need to worry
about which layer is selected:

The Layers palette showing the photo on the Background layer.

To play the Sepia Toning action, I'll simply click on it to select it in the
Actions palette, then I'll click on the Play icon at the bottom of the
palette, just like I did when I ran the Vignette action earlier:

Select the action you want to run, then click on the Play icon at the
bottom of the Actions palette.
If you look closely to the left of the Sepia Toning action's name, you'll
notice that the dialog box toggle icon box is empty, which tells us that
no dialog boxes will appear when we run this action. Photoshop will
complete every step on its own without stopping to ask us anything
along the way. And sure enough, after clicking the Play icon,
Photoshop goes ahead and applies a sepia tone effect to my photo
for me:
The photo now has a sepia tone effect applied to it after running the
action.
Just as we saw with the Vignette action earlier, the result isn't too
bad at all, especially for an action that's included for free with
Photoshop! If I look in my Layers palette, I can see what Photoshop
has done:

The Layers palette after running the Sepia Toning action.

Before running the action, we had only one layer, the Background
layer. Now, with the action completed, we can see that we have
three layers. If we look at the layer preview thumbnails, we can see
that the layer directly above the Background layer, "Layer 1",
contains a copy of the original image, and this copy has been
desaturated (all the color has been removed). And at the very top of
the layer stack, we find a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer, which is
what's giving us our sepia color.
To see exactly what Photoshop has done with the action, let's twirl
open the Sepia Toning action in the Actions palette, and we'll twirl
open the individual steps as well so we can view all the details:

Viewing the details of the Sepia Toning action in the Actions palette.
Not only does this ability to view specific details of an action help us
troubleshoot actions we're recording ourselves, it also allows us to
analyze other people's actions so we can learn from them! In the
case of our Sepia Toning action, we can see that the action consists
of five main steps, beginning with "Make snapshot", which creates a
snapshot in the History palette of how the image looked immediately
before running the action. Photoshop then makes a new blank layer
above the Background layer (step 2), merges the original image on
the Background layer onto the new blank layer above it while
keeping the Background layer intact (step 3), desaturates the image
on the new layer (step 4), and finally, adds a Hue/Saturation
adjustment layer, clips it to the layer below so that only the
desaturated layer will be affected, selects the Colorize option, and
sets the Hue, Saturation and Lightness values to create the sepia
tone. All of these steps are performed automatically for us by
Photoshop as part of the action!

Let's look at another of

Photoshop's built-in actions,
this time from a different action
set. I'll load in the Frames action
set by selecting it from the
bottom of the Actions palette's
menu, just as I did with the
Image Effects set on the
previHow To Use Actions In
Photoshop
Written by Steve Patterson. In this series of tutorials, we're going to
look at everything you need to know to get up and running with
Photoshop Actions ! We'll look at what Photoshop actions are and
what the difference is between an action and an action set . We'll
explore some of Photoshop's Default Actions as well as the
additional action sets that install for free with Photoshop. We'll
learn all about the Actions palette , how to play an action , how to
edit an action , how to view the details of an action, how to
analyze an action by playing through it one step at a time, how to
load , save and delete actions, and of course, how to record our
very own actions from scratch! There's lots to learn, so let's get
started!
Download our tutorials as print-ready PDFs!

Tutorial Quick Links...

If you want to learn everything you need to know about Photoshop
actions, I highly suggest you read through the entire tutorial from
beginning to end since each section builds on topics covered in the
previous sections. If, for example, you skip straight to the section on
how to record an action, you'll be missing out on quite a bit of
information. However, if you do want to jump to a specific section,
here's some handy links:
Photoshop's Default Actions - A look at the actions that
are automatically loaded into Photoshop!
Photoshop's Additional Built-In Action Sets - Even
more free actions that install with Photoshop!
Stepping Through An Action - Learn to analyze actions
by playing them one step at a time!
Editing An Action In Photoshop - Everything you need to
know to edit and customize actions!
Recording An Action - Learn how to record your own
actions from scratch!
Saving And Loading Actions - How to make sure you
don't lose your actions!

Automating Photoshop With Actions -

Introduction
Let's face it, you're lazy. It's okay, no one's looking. We're all friends
here. Between you and me, though, you don't really like to work. At
least, not when it comes to the boring stuff. Sure, you enjoy working
when you get to do things that are fun, interesting or challenging.
Everyone likes to show off their skills. But when it comes to those
repetitive, mundane, no-brainer tasks (affectionately known as "grunt
work") that seem to take up way too much of your life, even when
you're on someone else's time, you'd be more than happy to pass
those things off to someone else while you head off for a well-
deserved extended coffee break.
What if you could pass many of those repetitive tasks off to
Photoshop? What if there was a way that you could run through
something once while Photoshop watches, paying close attention to
each step, and then from that point on, whenever you need the work
done, you could just let Photoshop do it for you? Good news!
Photoshop is ready and willing to free you from the boredom of
repetition! Of course, good news is usually followed by bad news,
and the bad news is that Photoshop can't do absolutely everything
for you, which is actually good news since we'd all be out of a job if it
could. There are certain things that Photoshop simply can't do on its
own. For example, you couldn't select someone in a photo with the
Lasso Tool and then expect Photoshop to automatically know how to
select someone in any photo from that point on. Maybe one day, but
we're not quite there yet. Even so, there's still plenty of things
Photoshop can do automatically for you once you show it how. In
fact, as you become more familiar with using actions, learning what
you can and can't do with them, and even how to get around some
of the things you wouldn't normally think you'd be able to do, you'll
probably find yourself coming up with some pretty amazing and
elaborate stuff! Imagine completing work on a complicated, time-
consuming, fifty-step photo effect and then being able to instantly
recreate that same effect on a different photo, or on as many photos
as you like, simply by pressing Play on an action! Now you're
starting to see the possibilities!
Of course, actions can be used with much simpler tasks as well, as
we'll see.
Photoshop Actions: The Essential Non-
Essentials, Essentially
Technically speaking, actions are not what you would call absolutely
essential when working in Photoshop. By that, I mean there's
nothing you can do in Photoshop with an action that you couldn't do
without using an action. You could go your entire life without ever
using them if you really wanted to. Actions were designed purely to
make your life easier, sort of like how you could argue that it's not
absolutely essential to know how to drive a car (or at least know
someone who's willing to drive you around). Technically, you could
walk from place to place and you'd eventually end up at your
destination, but environmental, financial and health benefits aside,
why spend hours getting there by foot when a car would have taken
you to the same place in a fraction of the time?
Imagine that you had a hundred or even a thousand (or more!)
photos that you had to resize for print or for the web, and you had to
sit at your computer resizing each one individually. At best, you may
find yourself getting really good at using keyboard shortcuts, but it
would still take you a long time to resize them all, time that could
have been spent taking more photos! With actions, you could resize
one of the images, save the process as an action, and then let
Photoshop automatically resize the rest for you! Or let's say you
wanted to add a copyright watermark to all the photos. Again, you
could add it to each image individually, or you could add it to one
image, save the steps as an action, and then sit back while
Photoshop does the rest! These are just a couple of basic examples
of how you can put Photoshop to work for you using actions. With a
little thought and some practice, there's no telling how many uses
you'll come up with for them!

Fear, Anxiety And Confusion, Oh My!

As amazingly helpful and wonderful as actions are, many Photoshop
users, even long-time users, stay as far away from actions as
possible, with fear, anxiety and confusion being the biggest reasons.
Many people press the Record button and then suddenly feel like the
little red button in the Actions palette is watching them, mocking
them, laughing at them. Sweat starts pouring down their face, hands
start shaking, and in no time, they're in the grips of a full-blown panic
attack! The reason is because the controls for recording and playing
actions look very much like the traditional controls you find on most
recording devices, and since most recording devices record
everything in real time, people mistakenly assume that once you
press Record in the Actions palette, Photoshop is also recording
everything in real time. They click through the steps as quickly as
possible before Photoshop loses patience with them, which causes
them to panic, which leads to mistakes that cause even more
panicking. Then, suddenly, they realize they missed a step
somewhere, the whole thing looks completely wrong, and before
they know it, they're in such a mess that they hit the Escape key for
dear life, promising themselves never to go through that nightmare
again.
If this sounds like you, take a few deep breaths and relax. Just chill.
There's absolutely no reason to rush or panic when recording
actions because they are not recorded in real time. Let' s say that
again just to be clear. Actions are not recorded in real time. You
could press the Record button, leave the house, go out for dinner
and a movie, come back, watch some tv, take a shower, and then,
hours later, come back to your computer to actually work through the
steps necessary for your action and Photoshop wouldn't care. Not
even a little. All Photoshop records are the steps themselves, not
how long it took you to do them or how much time you wasted in
between steps. Feel free to take as much time as you need
recording an action. Even if you make a mistake, which you will from
time to time no matter how long you've been using actions, you can
easily go back and make changes later since actions are completely
editable. Actions are meant to make your life easier, not stress you
out.

Actions Compatibility
Another great thing about actions is how portable they are. Generally
speaking, you can record an action in any version of Photoshop and
it will work in any other version of Photoshop! Actions are even
cross-platform compatible, meaning that an action recorded on a PC
will work on a Mac and vice versa!
Now, notice that I did say "generally speaking", and that's because
you can run into situations where an action recorded in one version
of Photoshop will not work in a different version, at least not without
some editing. A little common sense, though, explains why. If you're
recording an action in Photoshop CS3, for example, and your action
uses a feature that's new in CS3, and then you load that action into
an earlier version of Photoshop, one where the feature isn't
available, the action won't work. Why? Because the action uses a
feature that's only available in Photoshop CS3. In most cases, you
should be fine using actions that were recorded in older versions of
Photoshop, since most of the features from older versions are still
available in the newest versions. But if you're recording an action in
a newer version of Photoshop and you know it's going to be used
with older versions, you'll want to stick to using features and
commands that are available in older versions as well. See?
Common sense stuff.
The Actions Palette
A little later on, we'll see how to record a simple action so you can
get a feel for how they work. Before we record anything though, we
should first take a look at Command Central for actions in Photoshop
- the Actions palette. The Actions palette is where anything and
everything related to actions is done, from recording and playing
them to saving, loading, editing, deleting, and organizing them. By
default, the Actions palette is grouped in beside the History palette,
even though the two palettes have nothing to do with each other.
Also by default, the History palette is the one "in focus", meaning
that it's the one visible while the Actions palette is hiding behind it.
You'll need to click on the Actions palette's name tab to bring it to
the front:

The Actions palette.

If, for some reason, the Actions palette is not open on your screen,
you can access it by going up to the Window menu at the top of the
screen and choosing Actions . As you can see, there really isn't
much going on inside the Actions palette at first, but let's take a
closer look at what's there.
The Controls
If you look down at the very bottom of the Actions palette, you'll see
a series of icons, similar to what we see with most of Photoshop's
palettes:

The icons at the bottom of the Actions palette.

As I mentioned earlier, notice how the three icons on the left look
very similar to traditional recording device controls, and in fact, they
represent the exact same functions. Starting from the left (the square
icon), we have Stop, Record, and Play, followed by the New Action
Set icon, the New Action icon, and finally, the standard Trash Bin
icon for deleting actions and action sets.

The Palette Menu

As with all of the palettes in Photoshop, the Actions palette comes
with its own fly-out menu where we can access various options and
commands, as well as load in some additional action sets. I'm using
Photoshop CS3 here, and if you are as well, you can access the fly-
out menu by clicking on the menu icon in the top right corner of the
Actions palette. If you're using an older version of Photoshop, you'll
see a small right-pointing arrow in the top right corner of the palette.
Click on it to access the palette menu:

Click on the menu icon (Photoshop CS3) or the right-pointing arrow

(Photoshop CS2 and earlier) in the top right corner to access the fly-
out menu.
All of the commands we just looked at along the bottom of the
Actions palette (Stop, Record, Play, New Action Set, New Action,
and Delete) are available in the fly-out menu, so there's a bit of
repetition here (as there is pretty much everywhere in Photoshop),
along with a few additional commands for editing actions, like Insert
Menu Item, Insert Stop, and Insert Path. The fly-out menu is also
where we find the options for loading , saving , replacing ,
resetting , and clearing actions. These are the menu options you'll
use most often.
At the very bottom of the fly-out menu is where we find additional
action sets that are installed with Photoshop, like Frames , Image
Effects , and Text Effects , along with others. Some of the actions
you'll find in these sets can actually be somewhat useful, but unlike
the Default Actions set, they are not loaded automatically for us.
We'll look at how to load these additional action sets in when we take
a closer look at Photoshop's default and built-in actions next!
ous page :

Selecting the Frames action set from the Actions palette menu.
This loads the Frames set into the Actions palette for me, directly
below the Image Effects set. I'll twirl open the Frames set by clicking
on the triangle to the left of the set's name so we can see all of the
actions inside of it. As the name of the action set implies, each of
these actions will create a frame effect for us:
The Actions palette displaying the individual actions inside the
Frames set.
If you look closely, you'll notice that the Vignette action we ran from
the Default Actions set is also found here in the Frames set. You'll
also find the "Frame Channel - 50 pixel" and "Wood Frame - 50
pixel" actions in both the Frames set and the Default Actions set. Of
course, there's lots more frame actions available in the Frames set,
and running any of them is as easy as selecting the one you want
and clicking the Play icon at the bottom of the palette, just as we've
done a couple of times already.
Let's try out one of these frame effects. Here's a photo that I want to
apply a frame effect to:
A photo of a grandmother and granddaughter.
We've already seen what the Vignette action does, so this time, let's
see what sort of effect the Photo Corners action will give us. I'll click
on Photo Corners in the Actions palette to select it, then I'll click on
the Play icon at the bottom of the palette:

Selecting and playing the Photo Corners action.

Notice here as well that the dialog box toggle icon to the left of the
Photo Corners action's name is empty, telling us that Photoshop will
run through this entire action from beginning to end without popping
up any dialog boxes asking us for information. And sure enough,
after clicking the Play icon and waiting a couple of seconds for
Photoshop to complete the steps, my image now has a photo
corners effect applied to it:
The image now has a photo corners effect applied to it.
As with many of the effects actions that Photoshop comes with, the
end result probably won't win any awards, but if you don't have a lot
of time and need something fast, they can certainly be helpful. Plus,
if you're a beginner, playing these actions and checking out the
details of each step is a great way to learn! In this case, we ran an
action named Photo Corners and photo corners is what we got.
Considering that we had to do absolutely nothing ourselves to create
the effect other than play the action, and that the action is included
for free with Photoshop, it's hard to find fault with it.
Having said that, I'm not a big fan of the colors that this action uses. I
could probably live with the white photo corners themselves, but the
gray background does nothing for me. Wouldn't it be great if we
could edit the action and customize it ourselves? Well, guess what?
We can! Editing an action is easy! At least, it's easy once you've
figured out which steps you need to edit.

Photoshop Actions – The

Default Actions
In the previous section , we looked briefly at what actions are and
why you'd want to use them, and we took a quick look at
Photoshop's Actions palette, which is where we do everything from
recording, playing, editing, and saving actions to loading in additional
action sets.

Photoshop's Default Actions Set

When we first bring up the Actions palette, we see that Photoshop
has loaded a set of actions for us, with the descriptive name "Default
Actions".

The Actions palette.

The Difference Between An "Action" And An

"Action Set"
Before we continue, we need to understand the difference between
an action and an action set. If you look closely at the actions palette,
you'll see a folder icon to the left of the words "Default Actions", and
that's essentially what an action set is. It's a folder that contains your
actions, just like a folder in a filing cabinet might contain various
forms, receipts, and what not. In this case, the Default Actions folder
(action set) contains various actions that are automatically loaded
into Photoshop for us.
So where are the actions then? They're inside the folder, which
brings up the question, "Okay, so how do I open the folder?" To open
(and close) a folder, simply click on the triangle to the left of the
folder. This will "twirl open" (I love saying that for some reason) the
folder, or if the folder was already open, it will close it. Go ahead and
click on the triangle. You'll see the folder open and all of the actions
inside of it will appear:
The actions are now visible inside the action set.

Different Default Actions In Photoshop CS2

As I mentioned, I'm using Photoshop CS3 here, but the default
actions shown above are the same default actions that Adobe has
been including with Photoshop for years, with one exception. For
whatever reason, when Adobe released Photoshop CS2 , they
decided to replace the usual default actions with new ones. If you're
using Photoshop CS2, you'll see these default actions instead:

The usual default actions were replaced with new ones in Photoshop
CS2.
Notice how the name of each action in the list contains the word
"workspaces", and that's because the only thing these actions do is
allow you to select from the various workspaces that Photoshop
comes with. Without getting into details about what workspaces are,
let's just say that these default actions in Photoshop CS2 are about
as useless as they come. Obviously, the folks at Adobe felt the same
way since they switched back to the classic default actions in
Photoshop CS3.
Fortunately, if you're using Photoshop CS2 and you want access to
those classic default actions, all you need to do is click on the small,
right-pointing arrow in the top right corner of the Actions palette to
bring up the fly-out menu, then click on Sample Actions from the list
of additional action sets at the bottom of the menu:

Selecting "Sample Actions" from the list of additional actions in

Photoshop CS2.
As soon as you select "Sample Actions" from the list, you'll see the
Sample Actions action set appear in the Actions palette directly
below the Default Actions set. Click on the triangle to twirl open the
Sample Actions folder and you'll see all of the individual actions
inside of it. These are the exact same actions that ship as the
Default Actions with other versions of Photoshop:

The Sample Actions set in Photoshop CS2 contains the default

actions from other versions of Photoshop.
Again, the Sample Actions set is only available in Photoshop CS2
and only because Adobe chose to replace the default actions in CS2
with new ones. From this point on, when I say "default actions" or
"Default Actions set", if you're using Photoshop CS2, just know that
I'm referring to the actions in your Sample Actions set, which are the
default actions in all other versions of Photoshop.

Photoshop's Default Actions

Now that we've cleared up that little issue for Photoshop CS2 users,
let's take a look at some of the default actions that Photoshop
installs for us. Believe it or not, some of them are actually kind of
useful, especially if you're pressed for time and just need a quick and
dirty effect. There's 12 different actions that install as part of the
Default Actions set, and while we won't look at all of them since you
can easily do that on your own, let's check a couple of them out to
see how they work.

The "Vignette" Default Action

At the top of the list of default actions is one named Vignette
(selection) :

The "Vignette (selection)" default action.

This action was put together for us by the good folks at Adobe and
contains all the steps necessary to add a classic vignette effect to a
photo. The reason Adobe added "(selection)" in the name is because
before we run the action, we need to first draw out a selection where
we want the vignette to appear. Once we've drawn a selection, all
we'll need to do is play the action and Photoshop will do the rest for
us!
Here's the photo I want to add a classic vignette to:
The original photo.
As I mentioned, we need to draw out a selection inside the image
before we can run the action, so I'll select the Elliptical Marquee Tool
from the Tools palette and I'll use it to drag out an elliptical selection
in the center of the image:

The image after dragging out a selection with the Elliptical Marquee
Tool.
Before we run the action, let's take a quick look our Layers palette,
where we can see that currently, we have only one layer, the
Background layer, which contains the original photo. Nothing has
been done to the image yet, with the exception of the selection I
added a moment ago:

The Layers palette showing the original image on the Background

layer.

Playing The Action

To play the Vignette action, all we need to do is select it in the
Actions palette (the currently selected action is highlighted in blue),
then click on the Play icon at the bottom of the palette:

Select the Vignette action, then click on the Play icon.

As soon as we click Play, Photoshop begins running through all the
steps necessary to complete our effect. In this case, one of the steps
involves us choosing a feather radius for the selection we added a
moment ago. Feathering a selection makes the selection edges
softer. The greater the feather radius, the softer the edges. Now,
Adobe could have included a specific feather radius as part of the
action, which would avoid us having to choose one ourselves, but
since every photo is different, it's preferable that we have the ability
to set the feather radius ourselves on an image-by-image basis.
We'll learn how to add the option to make changes like this with
actions later on. For now, we'll just continue on with our vignette
action.
Since we need to speciify a feather radius as part of the action,
Photoshop automatically pops up the Feather Selection dialog box
for us. The default feather radius is 5 pixels which is a bit too small
for our vignette effect. I'm going to set my feather radius to 20 pixels,
which will make my selection edges nice and soft. Depending on the
size of your image, you may want to increase the radius value even
further:

Photoshop's Feather Selection dialog box. Higher radius values

result in softer selection edges.
Click OK when you're done to close the dialog box. The feather
radius is the only option we need to set manually with this action, so
Photoshop continues on at this point and completes the vignette
effect for us. Here's my final result. Remember, all I had to do was
drag out an initial selection and then choose a feather radius.
Photoshop did everything else as part of the Vignette action:

The completed effect after running the Vignette action.

Not bad at all, especially considering how little work I had to do
myself. Now that the effect is complete, let's take another look at our
Layers palette:
The Layers palette after running the Vignette action.
Before we ran the action, all we had in the Layers palette was a
single layer, the Background layer. With the action and the effect
now complete, we can see that Photoshop has added two more
layers for us above the Background layer. We can even see by
looking at the layer preview thumbnails that the middle layer, "Layer
2", has been filled with solid white and that the top layer, "Layer 1",
contains only the part of the original image that was within the initial
selection I made. Everything outside of the selection has been
deleted. All of this was done automatically by Photoshop as part of
the Vignette action.
If you recall from our look at the difference between an action and
an action set in Photoshop, we learned that an action set is really
nothing more than a folder, and that individual actions are placed
inside the folder. We learned that we can open a folder (action set) to
view the actions inside of it simply by clicking on the small triangle to
the left of the folder icon. Clicking on the triangle again will close the
folder.
We can do the exact same thing with actions. By default, an action is
closed inside the Actions palette, hiding the individual steps that
make up the action from view. To twirl open an action and see all of
the steps, simply click on the triangle to the left of the action's name.
Here I've clicked on the triangle for the Vignette action, and we can
now see all of the steps that Photoshop runs through when creating
the effect for us:
Click on the triangle to the left of the action name to view the
individual steps.
When playing an action, Photoshop runs through each step in the list
from top to bottom until it reaches the end. In the case of the
Vignette action, we can see that there's 7 steps which Photoshop
completes for us, beginning with "Make snapshot", which creates a
snapshot in the History palette of how the image appeared just
before we ran the action, and ending with "Move current layer".

Viewing The Details Of Each Step In An Action

Notice how some of the steps also have triangles beside their name.
These triangles twirl open the specific details for each step so we
can see exactly what's going on. Now we're really getting down to
the nitty gritty of how the action works. For example, here I've twirled
open the second step in the action, "Feather":

Clicking on the triangle beside an individual step reveals the specific

details.
Being able to view specific details of a step is invaluable when trying
to figure out why an action you're trying to record isn't working the
way you expected, or why it works perfectly with one image but not
another. With the details of the Feather step now visible, we can see
that the first thing Photoshop tries to do with this step is add a
feather radius of 5 pixels to the selection we made before running
the action.

Showing And Hiding Dialog Boxes When Playing

An Action
Remember what happened though? Instead of automatically
applying a feather radius of 5 pixels, Photoshop popped open the
Feather Selection dialog box for us so we could enter in our own
radius value.
Why did Photoshop do that? Why didn't it simply set the radius value
to 5 pixels on its own and carry on with the rest of the action? The
reason is because Photoshop allows us to decide whether or not we
want certain dialog boxes to pop up when an action is playing.
"Wait a minute," you're saying, "I thought the whole point of actions
was so Photoshop does all the work for me. Why the heck would I
want a bunch of dialog boxes popping up on the screen all the time
expecting me to enter values for this and that?" Geez, you really are
lazy, aren't you? Well, certainly there will be plenty of times when
you won't need Photoshop asking you which values to use for
different commands and options. But what would happen, for
example, if Photoshop hadn't asked us for a new feather radius
value when we ran the Vignette action? It would simply add a 5 pixel
feather radius to the selection every time we ran the action,
regardless of the size of the image. Since different size images
would require a different feather radius value, an action that doesn't
give us the option to change the radius value wouldn't be very useful
to us.
By default, Photoshop does not pop open dialog boxes when we run
actions. It simply uses whatever values we used for the various
commands and options when we recorded the action. If we want
Photoshop to open a dialog box for us when an action plays, we
need to tell it to do so, and the way we do that is by clicking on the
dialog box toggle icon to the left of the individual step. By default, the
toggle icon is hidden and all we see is an empty square. This means
that the dialog box will not appear.
If we look closely at the Actions palette though, we can see that the
dialog box toggle icon is appearing to the left of the Feather step (it
looks like a small gray dialog box):

The dialog box toggle icon is visible to the left of the Feather step.
With the toggle icon visible, Photoshop knows that when it reaches
that step, it needs to display the related dialog box and allow us to
enter a new value, if needed, before carrying on with the rest of the
action. If we decide we'd rather just skip past the dialog box and
allow Photoshop to use whatever values were recorded with the
action, all we'd need to do is click on the toggle icon to make it
disappear.

Showing Or Hiding All Dialog Boxes For An

Action
If you want every step in an action to display its dialog box when the
action is played (or at least, every step that has a related dialog box,
since not every step will have one), you could click the toggle icon
for each individual step on or off, but an easier and faster way is to
click on the toggle icon beside the name of the action itself. This
main toggle icon controls the toggle icons for all of the individual
steps at once. If we look for a moment at the toggle icon to the left of
our Vignette action's name, we can see that the icon is currently
being displayed, but for some reason it appears red rather than gray:
The dialog box toggle icon beside the name of the action currently
appears red.
Photoshop occasionally likes to display things in red because it
knows that red tends to make people feel uneasy, even angry, and
as everyone knows, Photoshop takes great pleasure in watching us
suffer.
Okay, that's not why. When an action's main dialog box toggle icon is
displaying in red, it means that at least one, but not all , of the
individual steps in the action are currently set to display their dialog
box when the action is played. Some dialog boxes are turned on,
some are not. That's what the red color means. See? No reason to
be angry. If you want to instantly turn all the dialog boxes in the
action on, just click on the action's main toggle icon. Photoshop will
pop up a warning telling you what you already knew, that you're
about to toggle every dialog box in the action either on or off:

Photoshop displays a warning that we're about to toggle every dialog

box in the action on or off.
Click OK to exit out of the dialog box. And now, if we look again at
our Actions palette, we can see that the main toggle icon for the
action has changed from red to gray, which now tells us that every
dialog box for the action is currently turned on. We can also see all
the dialog boxes appearing beside each individual step:
All dialog boxes for the action are now turned on, and the main
toggle icon's color has changed from red to gray.
If you want to turn off all dialog boxes for an action at once, click on
the main toggle icon once again. Photoshop will pop up the same
warning box we saw a moment ago, telling us that we're about to
toggle the state of all dialog boxes in the action. Click OK to close
out of it, and this time, we can see that all of the toggle icons,
including the main one beside the name of the action, have
disappeared:

All dialog boxes for the action are now turned off. The toggle icons,
including the main toggle icon, have all disappeared.
Okay, we've successfully ran our very first action, and we've seen
how to view the individual steps that Photoshop runs through to
complete the action. We've also looked at how to toggle dialog boxes
on and off when an action is playing so we can make any necessary
changes to a command or option. Feel free to try out the remaining
default actions on your own. Remember that some of the default
actions are meant to be used with type, so you'll need some type in
your document before running them. If, after running an action, you
want to revert back to your original image, you can either press
Ctrl+Alt+Z (Win) / Command+Option+Z (Mac) a few times to undo all
the steps in the action, or go up to the File menu at the top of the
screen and choose Revert to revert your image back to the state it
was in when you last saved it. You can quickly access the Revert
command by pressing the F12 key on your keyboard.

How To Use Actions In

Photoshop
Written by Steve Patterson. In this series of tutorials, we're going to
look at everything you need to know to get up and running with
Photoshop Actions ! We'll look at what Photoshop actions are and
what the difference is between an action and an action set . We'll
explore some of Photoshop's Default Actions as well as the
additional action sets that install for free with Photoshop. We'll
learn all about the Actions palette , how to play an action , how to
edit an action , how to view the details of an action, how to
analyze an action by playing through it one step at a time, how to
load , save and delete actions, and of course, how to record our
very own actions from scratch! There's lots to learn, so let's get
started!
Tutorial Quick Links...
If you want to learn everything you need to know about Photoshop
actions, I highly suggest you read through the entire tutorial from
beginning to end since each section builds on topics covered in the
previous sections. If, for example, you skip straight to the section on
how to record an action, you'll be missing out on quite a bit of
information. However, if you do want to jump to a specific section,
here's some handy links:
Photoshop's Default Actions - A look at the actions that
are automatically loaded into Photoshop!
Photoshop's Additional Built-In Action Sets - Even
more free actions that install with Photoshop!
Stepping Through An Action - Learn to analyze actions
by playing them one step at a time!
Editing An Action In Photoshop - Everything you need to
know to edit and customize actions!
 Recording An Action - Learn how to record your own
actions from scratch!
Saving And Loading Actions - How to make sure you
don't lose your actions!

Automating Photoshop With Actions -

Introduction
Let's face it, you're lazy. It's okay, no one's looking. We're all friends
here. Between you and me, though, you don't really like to work. At
least, not when it comes to the boring stuff. Sure, you enjoy working
when you get to do things that are fun, interesting or challenging.
Everyone likes to show off their skills. But when it comes to those
repetitive, mundane, no-brainer tasks (affectionately known as "grunt
work") that seem to take up way too much of your life, even when
you're on someone else's time, you'd be more than happy to pass
those things off to someone else while you head off for a well-
deserved extended coffee break.
What if you could pass many of those repetitive tasks off to
Photoshop? What if there was a way that you could run through
something once while Photoshop watches, paying close attention to
each step, and then from that point on, whenever you need the work
done, you could just let Photoshop do it for you? Good news!
Photoshop is ready and willing to free you from the boredom of
repetition! Of course, good news is usually followed by bad news,
and the bad news is that Photoshop can't do absolutely everything
for you, which is actually good news since we'd all be out of a job if it
could. There are certain things that Photoshop simply can't do on its
own. For example, you couldn't select someone in a photo with the
Lasso Tool and then expect Photoshop to automatically know how to
select someone in any photo from that point on. Maybe one day, but
we're not quite there yet. Even so, there's still plenty of things
Photoshop can do automatically for you once you show it how. In
fact, as you become more familiar with using actions, learning what
you can and can't do with them, and even how to get around some
of the things you wouldn't normally think you'd be able to do, you'll
probably find yourself coming up with some pretty amazing and
elaborate stuff! Imagine completing work on a complicated, time-
consuming, fifty-step photo effect and then being able to instantly
recreate that same effect on a different photo, or on as many photos
as you like, simply by pressing Play on an action! Now you're
starting to see the possibilities!
Of course, actions can be used with much simpler tasks as well, as
we'll see.
Photoshop Actions: The Essential Non-
Essentials, Essentially
Technically speaking, actions are not what you would call absolutely
essential when working in Photoshop. By that, I mean there's
nothing you can do in Photoshop with an action that you couldn't do
without using an action. You could go your entire life without ever
using them if you really wanted to. Actions were designed purely to
make your life easier, sort of like how you could argue that it's not
absolutely essential to know how to drive a car (or at least know
someone who's willing to drive you around). Technically, you could
walk from place to place and you'd eventually end up at your
destination, but environmental, financial and health benefits aside,
why spend hours getting there by foot when a car would have taken
you to the same place in a fraction of the time?
Imagine that you had a hundred or even a thousand (or more!)
photos that you had to resize for print or for the web, and you had to
sit at your computer resizing each one individually. At best, you may
find yourself getting really good at using keyboard shortcuts, but it
would still take you a long time to resize them all, time that could
have been spent taking more photos! With actions, you could resize
one of the images, save the process as an action, and then let
Photoshop automatically resize the rest for you! Or let's say you
wanted to add a copyright watermark to all the photos. Again, you
could add it to each image individually, or you could add it to one
image, save the steps as an action, and then sit back while
Photoshop does the rest! These are just a couple of basic examples
of how you can put Photoshop to work for you using actions. With a
little thought and some practice, there's no telling how many uses
you'll come up with for them!

Fear, Anxiety And Confusion, Oh My!

As amazingly helpful and wonderful as actions are, many Photoshop
users, even long-time users, stay as far away from actions as
possible, with fear, anxiety and confusion being the biggest reasons.
Many people press the Record button and then suddenly feel like the
little red button in the Actions palette is watching them, mocking
them, laughing at them. Sweat starts pouring down their face, hands
start shaking, and in no time, they're in the grips of a full-blown panic
attack! The reason is because the controls for recording and playing
actions look very much like the traditional controls you find on most
recording devices, and since most recording devices record
everything in real time, people mistakenly assume that once you
press Record in the Actions palette, Photoshop is also recording
everything in real time. They click through the steps as quickly as
possible before Photoshop loses patience with them, which causes
them to panic, which leads to mistakes that cause even more
panicking. Then, suddenly, they realize they missed a step
somewhere, the whole thing looks completely wrong, and before
they know it, they're in such a mess that they hit the Escape key for
dear life, promising themselves never to go through that nightmare
again.
If this sounds like you, take a few deep breaths and relax. Just chill.
There's absolutely no reason to rush or panic when recording
actions because they are not recorded in real time. Let' s say that
again just to be clear. Actions are not recorded in real time. You
could press the Record button, leave the house, go out for dinner
and a movie, come back, watch some tv, take a shower, and then,
hours later, come back to your computer to actually work through the
steps necessary for your action and Photoshop wouldn't care. Not
even a little. All Photoshop records are the steps themselves, not
how long it took you to do them or how much time you wasted in
between steps. Feel free to take as much time as you need
recording an action. Even if you make a mistake, which you will from
time to time no matter how long you've been using actions, you can
easily go back and make changes later since actions are completely
editable. Actions are meant to make your life easier, not stress you
out.

Actions Compatibility
Another great thing about actions is how portable they are. Generally
speaking, you can record an action in any version of Photoshop and
it will work in any other version of Photoshop! Actions are even
cross-platform compatible, meaning that an action recorded on a PC
will work on a Mac and vice versa!
Now, notice that I did say "generally speaking", and that's because
you can run into situations where an action recorded in one version
of Photoshop will not work in a different version, at least not without
some editing. A little common sense, though, explains why. If you're
recording an action in Photoshop CS3, for example, and your action
uses a feature that's new in CS3, and then you load that action into
an earlier version of Photoshop, one where the feature isn't
available, the action won't work. Why? Because the action uses a
feature that's only available in Photoshop CS3. In most cases, you
should be fine using actions that were recorded in older versions of
Photoshop, since most of the features from older versions are still
available in the newest versions. But if you're recording an action in
a newer version of Photoshop and you know it's going to be used
with older versions, you'll want to stick to using features and
commands that are available in older versions as well. See?
Common sense stuff.

The Actions Palette

A little later on, we'll see how to record a simple action so you can
get a feel for how they work. Before we record anything though, we
should first take a look at Command Central for actions in Photoshop
- the Actions palette. The Actions palette is where anything and
everything related to actions is done, from recording and playing
them to saving, loading, editing, deleting, and organizing them. By
default, the Actions palette is grouped in beside the History palette,
even though the two palettes have nothing to do with each other.
Also by default, the History palette is the one "in focus", meaning
that it's the one visible while the Actions palette is hiding behind it.
You'll need to click on the Actions palette's name tab to bring it to
the front:

The Actions palette.

If, for some reason, the Actions palette is not open on your screen,
you can access it by going up to the Window menu at the top of the
screen and choosing Actions . As you can see, there really isn't
much going on inside the Actions palette at first, but let's take a
closer look at what's there.

The Controls
If you look down at the very bottom of the Actions palette, you'll see
a series of icons, similar to what we see with most of Photoshop's
palettes:

The icons at the bottom of the Actions palette.

As I mentioned earlier, notice how the three icons on the left look
very similar to traditional recording device controls, and in fact, they
represent the exact same functions. Starting from the left (the square
icon), we have Stop, Record, and Play, followed by the New Action
Set icon, the New Action icon, and finally, the standard Trash Bin
icon for deleting actions and action sets.

The Palette Menu

As with all of the palettes in Photoshop, the Actions palette comes
with its own fly-out menu where we can access various options and
commands, as well as load in some additional action sets. I'm using
Photoshop CS3 here, and if you are as well, you can access the fly-
out menu by clicking on the menu icon in the top right corner of the
Actions palette. If you're using an older version of Photoshop, you'll
see a small right-pointing arrow in the top right corner of the palette.
Click on it to access the palette menu:

Click on the menu icon (Photoshop CS3) or the right-pointing arrow

(Photoshop CS2 and earlier) in the top right corner to access the fly-
out menu.
All of the commands we just looked at along the bottom of the
Actions palette (Stop, Record, Play, New Action Set, New Action,
and Delete) are available in the fly-out menu, so there's a bit of
repetition here (as there is pretty much everywhere in Photoshop),
along with a few additional commands for editing actions, like Insert
Menu Item, Insert Stop, and Insert Path. The fly-out menu is also
where we find the options for loading , saving , replacing ,
resetting , and clearing actions. These are the menu options you'll
use most often.
At the very bottom of the fly-out menu is where we find additional
action sets that are installed with Photoshop, like Frames , Image
Effects , and Text Effects , along with others. Some of the actions
you'll find in these sets can actually be somewhat useful, but unlike
the Default Actions set, they are not loaded automatically for us.
We'll look at how to load these additional action sets in when we take
a closer look at Photoshop's default and built-in actions next!
So this is the end of the photoshop guide i hope you all learned ad
least something !
Leave a review and let me know what you think !
DamiannB