image from http://www.morguefile.com/archive/?display=152510&

Using Actions! (in Photoshop)
by Matt Razzano

The actions palatte in Adobe Photoshop can save you a lot of time when doing tedious, repetitive tasks, such as preparing work for print, or resizing work. This tutorial will step you through the basics of using the actions palate in Photoshop.

For the purpose of demonstration, I will be stepping you through creating a macro to threshold black and white line-work.

1.Open your document from the raw scan in Photoshop.

2.Find the Actions Palate which is behind the history palate.

3.Select the “create new action” button.

4.A dialogue box will appear allowing you to name your action and key it to a hot key. Chose a hot key which will be easily remembered.
You will notice the red “record” button is illuminated on the actions palate menu. Now you can begin the process of preparing your image which will be easily repeatable at the push of a button later.

5.Go into the image drop-down menu and select Adjustments > Threshold.
A dialogue box will appear asking you to select the threshold of the image. If you have an image with a lot of fine line work, or grey blacks, you may want to set it higher than the default, but for most work the default of 128 is fine.

6.Click OK.

7.Click the square “stop” button on the Actions Palate Menu.
Celebrate! You have now created an action which will be available for all images you may open on the particular computer which the action was created.

You can also save your actions to take them with you. Simply hit the triangular button in the upper right hand corner of the Actions Palate Menu and select Save Actions from the list. Don’t forget that you must highlight the action, or actions set you wish to save.

A dialogue box will appear asking you where you wish to save the actions file and what you wish to call it. Make sure you put it somewhere you will remember.

You can now take your custom actions with you to any computer which has Adobe Photoshop running on it.

To load your actions, simply click the triangle button at the top of the actions palate menu and select “Load Actions.”

A dialogue box will appear asking you to find your actions file. Select it and ACTION AWAY!