Actions and Automation in Photoshop 2020

Using Photoshops built in Robots

I have a simple philosophy in Photoshop, if you are doing the same thing over and over, you are doing it wrong. There must be a quicker way. I have observed many people’s workflows and I often cringe. Most people waste too much time, they are spending hours, or even days toiling away for days on tasks that could be easily automated, or performed in a few keystrokes. I too made all those mistakes, and wasted all that time in the past. Slaving away, knowing there must be a better way, but no one showed me.

Some may call it earning your dues. I call it being inefficient. So, I made a point of learning how to work efficiently, after all, I have a computer, shouldn’t that be doing all the heavy lifting for me? I found out almost everything in Photoshop can be automated, and now automation is part of my daily workflow. Now, I go home at a reasonable hour each night and no longer work weekends, (that’s a big deal for a self employed person). Automation isn’t just for the big stuff too, you can be saving time on every image you are working on, even automating small tasks, reducing 10 clicks to a single click.

Lessons include

Managing Actions – Loading and Saving Actions

Running Actions – How to use Actions

Creating actions – Create your first action

Insert Stops – Pausing and inserting instructions in Actions

Creative Actions – The whole process of making actions

Action Options – Summary of options in the Actions Menu

Derivative Actions – How to make new actions from existing actions

Smart Actions – How to make conditional actions that make decisions

Button Mode – A visual way to play back and organize actions

Batch Process – How to apply an action to a group of images

Make an action app – Using droplets we can make a drag and drop action

Actions as robots – Use variables and data sets for mass automation

Image Processor – A way to automate image resizing and formatting

Image Processor Pro – Automating images with extra options

Images to layers – A workflow to put images on layers and back to images

Combine open images – Take all the open windows and make them a single document

Develop settings in Bridge – How to process images without opening them

Batch ACR in Bridge – Adjust one photo from Bridge and then apply the settings to multiple photos

Using LUTS – How to create and use LUTS for instant color effects

Crop and Straighten – Automatically separate ganged scans

Contact Sheet – Automatically create an index of all your images