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Create a Desaturate Edges Action

now in this image, what I'd like to do is make the edges of the picture less colorful than the center of the picture. And therefore your I might be drawn to the more colorful areas in therefore drawn the middle of the image and not the edges. So let's create a brand new action, and I'm gonna call this de saturate edges click record in order to get something only happened in the edges of the picture. I'm gonna make a selection, So I'm gonna choose the selection tool. I'm gonna click near the upper right, but a little ways away from the edge. And I'm gonna drag down here then, Alecko and I'd like the opposite of that because right now we have the center selected and I'd like the edge. So I'll go to the select menu and I'll choose inverse. Then I would like the edge of my selection have a soft edge on it. One way of getting a soft itches to go to the select menu and choose modify and then choose feather. The problem with that is there's no preview. So you're really guessing at what number...

to use the second method you could use is to go here to select and mask. There's all sorts of settings in selected mask. Then you could ignore all of them, except for this one down here called Feather. And if you brought that up, you should be able to start seeing a softer and softer edge like that and then click. OK, so now we have the outer edge of the photographs selected, and it has a soft edge. The next thing I would like to do is create an adjustment layer in the adjustment layer like to use is called vibrance. Vibrance gives you two sliders, the same two sliders we have for controlling how colorful things are when we're using adobe camera raw. And in this case, I'm gonna lower the vibrance to make the edge of the picture less colorful. Finally, so I can remember why I have that layer. I'm gonna rename the layer off double clicking layers name and I'll just call this de saturate edges, and that's all they want this action to do. So now, at the bottom of the actions panel, I'm gonna hit the stop button. And now let's inspect this to see if it's gonna be universally applicable was started. The top here is this set selection. I'm gonna open that up and I see that this selection is measured in pixels. And so that means the top edge of the of the selection will be 116 pixels below the top of the document. It will be 136 pixels from the left edge of the document. In the bottom will be this far from the the top in the left edge. That's not gonna work for any file size. What if I have a square document? If it tries to make a selection of that size, it's not gonna be a square selection. So I need to replace this step in my action with something that is universally applicable. And so, let's see. We can figure out what that IHS first. There's no way for me to convert this step into anything other than pixels, so I'm gonna have to replace it to replace a step in the action. All you need to do is click on the step within the action and then at the bottom of the actions panel, you'll end up hitting record. But before I do that, Let's figure out how we're going to improve that step. Well, the measurement system that's used for making selections when creating actions is whatever your rulers are set to. So if I come up here to the view menu and I turn my rulers on, I can see what they're set to and just looking at the numbers I can tell they're not inches. They've got to be pixels because they're going upto 1800. Um, you can change that measurement system when the rulers are visible by right clicking within the ruler. And if you look at the list of choices that are available, I see one choice that will end up making this work regardless of the size of the original document. And that is percent when I choose percentage. Now it's gonna think, What percentage of the full with the document did I move over before I clicked in what percentage of the full height of the document did I move down when I clipped? So now let's record a new step with the step would like to replace selected I'm gonna hit the record button. Then I'll use the marquee tool, and I'll go up here to where I'd like my selection to begin and I'll drag down here to where I'd like it to end and I let go. It just created a new step. Step appears directly below the step that I had selected, and I'll then hit the stop button. Let's expand that step and see if it's any better. Yeah, now it means I was 5% below the top edge of the document and I was 8.2% of the width over. And then here's how far I was over when I ended in how far down and right, So now I'm gonna just click on the step that came before that, the one that's measured in pixels and I'll drag it to the trash can. Then let's look at any of the other steps to see if they'd mess us up in verse. That's not specific to the document selected mask. Well, the amount of feathering I might need to be different on each picture, because if I have a tiny image, let's they have an image that's only one inch wide. Then I created this action on an inch that was 30 inches wide the amount of feathering that I dialed in might need to vary depending on the document, and I'm not able to set feathering as a percentage. So therefore, it can't just very like the selection. But what I can do is if you look at this step in my action, there's a little rectangle to the left right over there. And if I turn that on by clicking on it, that means when it gets to this step, ask me for a setting, which means bring up the actual interface for what was being used here. So I can choose that myself, and that's what that means. Let's go to the next one down and here it says that we're going to use an adjustment layer called Vibrance next one down and we're setting the virus that negative 49 and OK, we're making something visible, and then we're naming a layer. But none of this told me the names of specific layers like it was trying to switch to a particular layer, so I think this would be nice. The only other thing I might want to do is here, where it's setting the vibrance to negative 49 I could click right there and that would make it so every time I could manually dial in how much I want a lesson it. So I think that's what I'm gonna do. Let's test this action, click on its name. And first I'm going to get this image back to its original by choosing Revert. And then I'm gonna play the action. But hit the play button and it gets to the point where I need a feather and here I can just adjust it. If this was a smaller image, I could use a lower setting. I just click OK, and it should continue the action. And right away it asked me what kind of vibrant setting I want. Cool Click OK, and it finished so that action works fine.

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