Actions Speak Louder Than Words

Ok, I don't know what's up with the title, but I just thought I'd save you some time and grief in photo adjustment, and talk about "Actions." Nested in the History palette, the Actions function essentially allows you to record a procedure (ie. color adjustment, filters--anything) and play it back on multiple photos to produce about the same results. Of course, if you have two very different shots, you won't necessarily want to use this, but for similiar images it's just awsome.

1. So here I have two photos from our hike up Mt. St. Helens. I picked them since the colors and all that were very close--what works on one will also work on the other.

























2. I activated one of the pictures, opened the Actions palette (next to History) and clicked the "New Action" button (the little page turning icon). I named it "Mountain" and began recording.







3. Whatever adjustments you now make will be recorded in the new action, so don't take any unecessary steps--though you can always undo. I did some minor Brightness/Contrast changes, and fiddled around with Levels, Color Balance and Selective color to correct the slightly brown color cast and to intensify the blue in the sky. I also decreased the image size. To stop recording just click the stop button. You now have a very powerful tool to edit similiar photos in no time at all.








4. I activated my other window, went to the Actions palette and pushed the play button. It automatically adjusted the photo to exactly the same settings as the last. Here are the finished photos. (You'll notice that the sky is more intense, and the white really shines--overall a significant improvement.)

























This kind of thing can also be done with the File-Automate-Batch command or Image-Adjustments-Match Color, but I think this is probably the most versatile method. If I don't sound very enthusiastic, don't be fooled. Every day I'm discovering the incredible power behind the tools I'm already familiar with--this program is the coolest thing!! In a future post, I'll go into text manipulation and fine-tuning, yet another amazing capability of Photoshop.

Sometime soon I'll post an update on my duck stamp. It's going well--the water's just about done, and I've made some good progress, but I'll have to speed things up in the next 3 weeks, cuz March is coming up fast!