Conditional Actions

Lesson Info

Conditional Actions

The next thing we're gonna do is we're gonna make what's called a conditional action. And a conditional action is just like it sounds. It's an if this then that. So I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna do something pretty clever here, just to separate what's happening from here and here and this is also another good practice, is to make an action in here that's called image size. And what I'm gonna do on this purposely, is I'm just gonna do something like this and then I'm gonna do at the very end and then press record, but guess what? I'm not gonna record anything. What I was doing there was just separating the fact that we have a curves dodge and burn from the rest of what I'm about to do. This is what I call a placeholder. All it's doing, it's not even going to be an action, we don't even want it to play anything, it's just a placeholder to divide it. Because what happens is, if you make an actions pack, whether it's for you or if it's for somebody else, and you get 40 actions in here, ...

you're gonna go, like, cross-eyed looking at where, where are these actions, they're all over the place, which one do I check, which one do I select? Because they're, you won't be able to find the ones that you wanna find. The minute you put page breaks in here like this, it allows you to go from one to the next without trying to dig through all of your actions. So now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna make a new action. I'm gonna make an action that does an image resize that's gonna resize the image if it's horizontal. So I'm gonna go make a new action and we'll do horizontal resize and we'll just call this 1,200. Actually let's do it smaller, let's do on how big this image is. Press record. Now I'm gonna go to Image and go to Image Size and I'm gonna change the width of this to 800 pixels. Basically what I'm doing is I'm making an action that's gonna resize my image and make it smaller, maybe for the web, make it for something that's a little bit easier, and then press OK. And then I'm gonna press stop, because all I needed that to do if we go back in our history states here, all I needed that to do was just resize my image, just make it smaller for the web, okay? So I'm gonna go back, now I'm gonna make another one. Let's do this. Let's make a duplicate of this with our history state, let's crop this and make it vertical, just a vertical image like this. You'll see why in a second. So now I'm gonna record an action on this one and it's gonna be vertical resize, we'll just call it 800 also. I'm gonna go to Image, Image Size, change the height to 800, OK, stop. So all I've done there is I made two actions, one that's a horizontal resize and one that's a vertical resize. So now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna make a conditional action and the conditional action is gonna be smart enough to assess the image that I have based on the parameters that I tell it to assess and select the appropriate action based on what I'm telling it to. So I'm gonna go ahead and press Insert Conditional, actually let me do this, I'm gonna make a new action and that new action's gonna be called Master Resize. Here I'm gonna Insert Conditional. If the current document is landscape, then play this, else play this, okay? So if the current document is a landscape, a landscape-based image, select horizontal, or else play vertical, press OK and then stop. And all it's gonna record in there is an if this then that statement. So if I open up this image here and I press, ooh, and I press play on that master resize, it's automatically gonna assess the image and automatically make it smaller. If I press play on this one, automatically resize that image, automatically make it smaller. So it's a conditional action. Now if for some reason though, this is really important to know, what I would do with these is probably put some kind of star there or something, maybe three stars, I don't know what that looks like to you, but watch what happens if I open up a new folder, a new action set and call this Other Actions and I take this master resize outta here and I put it in here and I press play. It's still gonna work (laughing), it shouldn't have. What happens here is if, if for instance, this actions folder is not present on my machine it will not work, because what this is doing is it's saying, and we can read this here actually and see why it's still working, if the current document is landscape then play this action, the action is horizontal resize of set CL actions lesson. So let's just, before I do this I'm gonna go ahead and cover myself. Any time you make actions it's a really good idea to save them, this right here, this whole panel right here in Photoshop is a temporary spot and it's kinda held within the cache. So if the cache within Photoshop dumps you will lose everything you built here, okay? That's, like, start writing this down. So what we wanna do is we have CL actions lesson, we're gonna click on the hamburger icon and we're gonna save Save Actions. Just save them. Photoshop will automatically put them where Photoshop's presets are for actions and press Save. That's all you need to do to ensure that you always have these actions and they don't go away when the cache gets purged. So now if I were to delete these actions, delete 'em, and then click on this action, watch what happens. Boom, that's what I was looking for. The command If is not currently available, why is the command If not currently available? Well that's because this action has to have those other actions to interact with it. If those actions aren't there it won't work. So we don't wanna break them apart, we wanna keep them together, we always want to keep them together because they interact with one another. So we'll go ahead and press stop. And I'm gonna go ahead and just, right here, if you ever wanna load your actions, right here we can go to Load Actions and there's our actions. This is also, if you ever wanna deliver these actions to somebody else, maybe you have a friend you wanna give them to or you wanna start selling 'em, this is the action that you're gonna want to disperse to the masses. So you could copy that to your desktop or wherever you wanna put that, that's your action. So I'm just gonna go ahead and load this and now we have that CL actions there. I'm gonna go ahead and drag this master resize back into this one and I can go ahead and delete that folder set. So now they're all back together, they're all comfy, they're all back together, they're all happy.

Class Description

Lessons

1. Bootcamp Introduction
2. The Bridge Interface
3. Setting up Bridge
4. Overview of Bridge
5. Practical Application of Bridge
6. Introduction to Raw Editing
7. Setting up ACR Preferences & Interface
8. Global Tools Part 1
9. Global Tools Part 2
10. Local Tools
11. Introduction to the Photoshop Interface
12. Toolbars, Menus and Windows
13. Setup and Interface
14. Adobe Libraries
15. Saving Files
16. Introduction to Cropping
17. Cropping for Composition in ACR
18. Cropping for Composition in Photoshop
19. Cropping for the Subject in Post
20. Cropping for Print
21. Perspective Cropping in Photoshop
22. Introduction to Layers
23. Vector & Raster Layers Basics
24. Adjustment Layers in Photoshop
25. Organizing and Managing Layers
26. Introduction to Layer Tools and Blend Modes
27. Screen and Multiply and Overlay
28. Soft Light Blend Mode
29. Color and Luminosity Blend Modes
30. Color Burn and Color Dodge Blend Modes
31. Introduction to Layer Styles
32. Practical Application: Layer Tools
33. Introduction to Masks and Brushes
34. Brush Basics
35. Custom Brushes
36. Brush Mask: Vignettes
37. Brush Mask: Curves Dodge & Burn
38. Brush Mask: Hue & Saturation
39. Mask Groups
40. Clipping Masks
41. Masking in Adobe Camera Raw
42. Practical Applications: Masks
43. Introduction to Selections
44. Basic Selection Tools
45. The Pen Tool
46. Masks from Selections
47. Selecting Subjects and Masking
48. Color Range Mask
49. Luminosity Masks Basics
50. Introduction to Cleanup Tools
51. Adobe Camera Raw
52. Healing and Spot Healing Brush
53. The Clone Stamp Tool
54. The Patch Tool
55. Content Aware Move Tool
56. Content Aware Fill
57. Custom Cleanup Selections
58. Introduction to Shapes and Text
59. Text Basics
60. Shape Basics
61. Adding Text to Pictures
62. Custom Water Marks
63. Introduction to Smart Objects
64. Smart Object Basics
65. Smart Objects and Filters
66. Smart Objects and Image Transformation
67. Smart Objects and Album Layouts
68. Smart Objects and Composites
69. Introduction to Image Transforming
70. ACR and Lens Correction
71. Photoshop and Lens Correction
72. The Warp Tool
73. Perspective Transformations
74. Introduction to Actions in Photoshop
75. Introduction to the Actions Panel Interface
76. Making Your First Action
77. Modifying Actions After You Record Them
78. Adding Stops to Actions
79. Conditional Actions
80. Actions that Communicate
81. Introduction to Filters
82. ACR as a Filter
83. Helpful Artistic Filters
84. Helpful Practical Filters
85. Sharpening with Filters
86. Rendering Trees
87. The Oil Paint and Add Noise Filters
88. Introduction to Editing Video
89. Timeline for Video
90. Cropping Video
91. Adjustment Layers and Video
92. Building Lookup Tables
93. Layers, Masking Video & Working with Type
94. ACR to Edit Video
95. Animated Gifs
96. Introduction to Creative Effects
97. Black, White, and Monochrome
98. Matte and Cinematic Effects
99. Gradient Maps and Solid Color Grades
100. Gradients
101. Glow and Haze
102. Introduction to Natural Retouching
103. Brightening Teeth
104. Clean Up with the Clone Stamp Tool
105. Cleaning and Brightening Eyes
106. Advanced Clean Up Techniques
107. Introduction to Portrait Workflow & Bridge Organization
108. ACR for Portraits Pre-Edits
109. Portrait Workflow Techniques
110. Introduction to Landscape Workflow & Bridge Organization
111. Landscape Workflow Techniques
112. Introduction to Compositing & Bridge
113. Composite Workflow Techniques
114. Landscape Composite Projects
115. Bonus: Rothko and Workspace
116. Bonus: Adding Textures to Photos
117. Bonus: The Mask (Extras)
118. Bonus: The Color Range Mask in ACR