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Introduction to Actions in Photoshop

Lesson 74 from: Adobe Photoshop CC Bootcamp

Blake Rudis

Introduction to Actions in Photoshop

Lesson 74 from: Adobe Photoshop CC Bootcamp

Blake Rudis

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Lesson Info

74. Introduction to Actions in Photoshop

Lessons

Class Trailer
1

Bootcamp Introduction

16:22
2

The Bridge Interface

13:33
3

Setting up Bridge

06:55
4

Overview of Bridge

11:29
5

Practical Application of Bridge

27:56
6

Introduction to Raw Editing

11:00
7

Setting up ACR Preferences & Interface

07:39
8

Global Tools Part 1

16:44
9

Global Tools Part 2

20:01
10

Local Tools

22:56
11

Introduction to the Photoshop Interface

07:13
12

Toolbars, Menus and Windows

25:07
13

Setup and Interface

11:48
14

Adobe Libraries

05:57
15

Saving Files

07:39
16

Introduction to Cropping

12:10
17

Cropping for Composition in ACR

04:44
18

Cropping for Composition in Photoshop

12:40
19

Cropping for the Subject in Post

03:25
20

Cropping for Print

07:34
21

Perspective Cropping in Photoshop

07:11
22

Introduction to Layers

08:42
23

Vector & Raster Layers Basics

05:05
24

Adjustment Layers in Photoshop

27:35
25

Organizing and Managing Layers

15:35
26

Introduction to Layer Tools and Blend Modes

21:34
27

Screen and Multiply and Overlay

09:15
28

Soft Light Blend Mode

07:34
29

Color and Luminosity Blend Modes

12:47
30

Color Burn and Color Dodge Blend Modes

07:43
31

Introduction to Layer Styles

11:43
32

Practical Application: Layer Tools

13:06
33

Introduction to Masks and Brushes

04:43
34

Brush Basics

09:22
35

Custom Brushes

04:01
36

Brush Mask: Vignettes

06:58
37

Brush Mask: Curves Dodge & Burn

06:53
38

Brush Mask: Hue & Saturation

07:52
39

Mask Groups

05:52
40

Clipping Masks

04:11
41

Masking in Adobe Camera Raw

07:06
42

Practical Applications: Masks

14:03
43

Introduction to Selections

05:42
44

Basic Selection Tools

17:41
45

The Pen Tool

11:56
46

Masks from Selections

04:22
47

Selecting Subjects and Masking

07:11
48

Color Range Mask

17:35
49

Luminosity Masks Basics

12:00
50

Introduction to Cleanup Tools

07:02
51

Adobe Camera Raw

10:16
52

Healing and Spot Healing Brush

14:56
53

The Clone Stamp Tool

10:20
54

The Patch Tool

06:38
55

Content Aware Move Tool

04:56
56

Content Aware Fill

06:46
57

Custom Cleanup Selections

15:42
58

Introduction to Shapes and Text

13:46
59

Text Basics

15:57
60

Shape Basics

07:00
61

Adding Text to Pictures

09:46
62

Custom Water Marks

14:05
63

Introduction to Smart Objects

04:37
64

Smart Object Basics

09:13
65

Smart Objects and Filters

09:05
66

Smart Objects and Image Transformation

10:57
67

Smart Objects and Album Layouts

11:40
68

Smart Objects and Composites

10:47
69

Introduction to Image Transforming

04:34
70

ACR and Lens Correction

09:45
71

Photoshop and Lens Correction

14:26
72

The Warp Tool

11:16
73

Perspective Transformations

20:33
74

Introduction to Actions in Photoshop

09:27
75

Introduction to the Actions Panel Interface

05:06
76

Making Your First Action

03:49
77

Modifying Actions After You Record Them

11:38
78

Adding Stops to Actions

04:01
79

Conditional Actions

07:36
80

Actions that Communicate

25:26
81

Introduction to Filters

04:38
82

ACR as a Filter

09:20
83

Helpful Artistic Filters

17:08
84

Helpful Practical Filters

07:08
85

Sharpening with Filters

07:32
86

Rendering Trees

08:20
87

The Oil Paint and Add Noise Filters

15:08
88

Introduction to Editing Video

06:20
89

Timeline for Video

08:15
90

Cropping Video

03:34
91

Adjustment Layers and Video

05:25
92

Building Lookup Tables

07:00
93

Layers, Masking Video & Working with Type

15:11
94

ACR to Edit Video

06:10
95

Animated Gifs

11:39
96

Introduction to Creative Effects

06:08
97

Black, White, and Monochrome

18:05
98

Matte and Cinematic Effects

08:23
99

Gradient Maps and Solid Color Grades

12:20
100

Gradients

04:21
101

Glow and Haze

10:23
102

Introduction to Natural Retouching

05:33
103

Brightening Teeth

10:25
104

Clean Up with the Clone Stamp Tool

08:07
105

Cleaning and Brightening Eyes

16:58
106

Advanced Clean Up Techniques

24:47
107

Introduction to Portrait Workflow & Bridge Organization

14:47
108

ACR for Portraits Pre-Edits

21:27
109

Portrait Workflow Techniques

18:46
110

Introduction to Landscape Workflow & Bridge Organization

12:17
111

Landscape Workflow Techniques

37:36
112

Introduction to Compositing & Bridge

06:59
113

Composite Workflow Techniques

34:01
114

Landscape Composite Projects

24:14
115

Bonus: Rothko and Workspace

05:15
116

Bonus: Adding Textures to Photos

07:05
117

Bonus: The Mask (Extras)

05:18
118

Bonus: The Color Range Mask in ACR

04:54

Lesson Info

Introduction to Actions in Photoshop

What is an action? Why do we use them? And some best practices. And this is gonna be a really wildly important one for you, especially if, I don't wanna sell myself outta the industry, but if you ever wanna sell actions, the best practices here are going to be gold for you. I just gave away my whole business. So what is an action? Actions in Photoshop will allow you to record yourself while you work so you can play them back later on any other image. I need you to think about the VCR, the VHS, the cassette player. So when I was a kid, there was this thing called TGIF, Thank God It's Friday, and they'd play all of our favorite television shows on Friday night. Now you don't dare show anything good on Friday night because nobody wants to sit there and watch TV. One of those shows, I believe, was Full House. So we would always rush, 'cause our parents would wanna go out to eat on Friday night, so we would rush to the VCR, we'd put a fresh blank tape in there, we would set the VCR to recor...

d itself so that we could record Full House and watch it when we got home. We could play it back whenever we wanted to over and over and over again. And it was always there for us. Probably did the same thing with Saved By The Bell. Maybe I'm dating myself a little bit. But Photoshop has the exact same capabilities. There's something going on in Photoshop, you can record it and you can play it back later. Why we use them, why would use them as photographers? Well, actions have changed the way I edit entirely. I rarely start any of my processing without them. I very rarely will start an image without putting it through some type of action, because there's some prerecorded workflow that's gonna help me out. So the whole thing here is this is workflow automation. They allow you to do things that you would commonly do, but do them faster and do them more efficiently. And not have to be doing the redundancy of constantly making those things. So what we've already talked about so far in this course, you've seen me make it a couple times. The dodge and burn layers, whether that's a dodge and burn 50% gray layer, or that's the curves layer, dodge and burn. If you make those all the time, it's redundant, and it becomes a pain in the butt. But you can go ahead and make an action of that, press play, and it's always there for you. We do this for efficiency. We do it for accuracy, so we can, accuracy so if we have a style that we have that's our own, we can replicate it without going outside of that style. We can do things deliberately, and definitely more predicatively. So we know, because we've record it, that it's done this on this image, it should do this on this image, I might just have to make a few minor tweaks. So here's some of your best practices when you're working with actions, because you would think, it's just like a smart object. Smart objects, you'd say, oh wow, we could do all this stuff with smart objects, why don't we always just use smart objects? Well because they have some downfalls and so do actions. With actions, you wanna experiment with what works. You can't be afraid of these things. When I first started working with actions, it was probably around 2006 or seven, when I pressed the record button, and I didn't know what I was doing, and I recorded like an entire day's worth of work. And I didn't know that you had to press stop. So tried to play this thing back on another thing and images are opening and closing and flying all over in front of me in Photoshop, and I was just, it was wild. But I learned a lot from that. I was like okay, well I recorded literally everything I just did in Photoshop, that was pretty cool. And then from there I started to deduce how actions worked. So you have to experiment with it. If you're, with anything with Photoshop, if you're playing around with a button, or you're playing around with something, do it on something that's like in your test folder, images that you don't really care about at that time and you wanna experiment. And don't be afraid to experiment. They don't bite. Anything that can be undone if you just press undo or go back to your history state to the very beginning. And if fails, just start over. It's not like the film days. So when I was younger and I was in high school working with black and white film in the analog days, I had made this print that I really loved, and I made it on this paper that had pockets and pits in it. That allowed me to paint onto that with these oil paints, special oil paints, for painting on images. Got all the way through this thing and made one little error and ruined the entire thing. I couldn't go back and repaint, because it was all manual painting done on this photograph. Here's the cool part. We're in Photoshop. If it fails, just start over. There are no harm, no foul, if you don't do this correctly. But I do annotate a lot things. As I'm doing this, as I'm experimenting, I write down what I'm doing with each one of those actions so that if it didn't record exactly the way I wanted it to, I can always go back and look at my annotations that I've made on my notebook, and it looks cool. It does look cool. It actually looks really cool. You open up my actions notebook and it looks like some type of wicked Photoshop code. Like I've got my wizard book of actions. So annotate everything. Not all steps are actionable. There are certain things that you're gonna do that just cannot be recorded into an action. Some of these things are masking with brushes. It can record masking with brushes, but I wouldn't do it. Just because you don't know what the image size is gonna be on another image. Here's just a little aside. A lot of things in Photoshop are pixel based based on the constraints of whatever that image is. If everything overnight, and maybe Adobe can listen to this, would turn everything into percentage based things, this would all change. So instead of looking at actual pixels, if we just looked at the percentage, there's certain filters in Photoshop that base things off of a percentage, and not off of the actual aspect ratio. Therefore, if it's an image that's this big, or an image that's this big, it's gonna do the same thing, because it's based on a percentage and not in the actual pixels or aspect ratio. So maybe we can all write to Adobe and get that fixed. (laughing) Anyway, masking with brushes can be very difficult. Sometimes they don't show up in the process of the action, or they might not show up with the exact same pen strokes or brush strokes. So my rule of thumb is to never put masking with brushes in my actions. Just don't do it. Selections are okay. So manual selections that are, well I should say, automatic selections, selections from things like luminosity masking, selections from the color range, the color range menu. Those are okay. But a selection made with the magic wand, just don't do it. 'Cause it's not gonna be predictable. What we're doing is we wanna get predictable results. Blend If is also okay. Blend If can be recorded into any of your actions as well, which is really awesome, because you make a really cool effect you like, you throw some Blend If in there, and it's going to be predictable. On the next image, it's going to protect the highlights, or going to protect the shadows, because you've got Blend If in there. I would avoid flattening your work without making a duplicate copy first. This is really important if you're making actions for other people. I can't stand it if I get someone's action and I press play on it, it takes all my work and flattens it down and then it runs. It's a lot easier to build an action on a flattened document, that's why a lot of these actions that you might even purchase online will flatten your image first. But what happens if you had 50 history states selected in your preferences, and this went through 99 things? Now you can't go back. All that work that you did in there, that layered work that you did that was beautiful, that you press play on that action, you can't go back in your history and fix it. So what I do is always make sure that if I'm making an action that needs me to flatten the work, I do it on another document, and that document will be a duplicate state from a history state, so you go into the history palette, make a duplicate state, and that fixes that problem. You gotta consider who you're making them for. If you're making them for yourself, you know how you operate, so you shouldn't have a problem. You don't have to make everything perfect. If you're making actions for yourself, they can be sloppy. There's nothing wrong with making 'em a little sloppy if they're just for you. And also this thing right here that says modal control stops may not be necessary. A modal control stop is where you stop an action from working so that you can give directions. And some of my actions will do that too. Because you might press the button and be like, "That's great, what did it do?" Well, a modal control can stop at any point between an action and say, "Hey, you're about to do something with the gaussian blur, "try anywhere between 40 and 60." You can be sloppy. If you're making them for other people though, you have to consider foreign language versions of Photoshop. This is something I never knew until I released my very first panel, and everyone who was in the Dutch version of Photoshop would press a button and it would just boom. How do you think I felt? 'Cause I didn't test it for foreign language versions of Photoshop. And I'll show you what to look for when you're working on your actions to ensure that things work in foreign languages. I'm really giving away the farm here. You can't cut corners. If you're doing these for other people, don't cut any corners, don't be sloppy. Make actions that are gonna work and be predictable for others. And if you are making them for others, you should consider adding modal controls, stops. And I'll show you what stops are in this course.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Photoshop Bootcamp Plug-In
Textures
Clouds
Painted Backgrounds
1 – Intro to Photoshop Bootcamp
6 – Intro to Raw Editing.zip
11 – Interface and Setup
16 – Intro to Cropping and Composition.zip
22 – Intro to Layers.zip
26 – Intro to Layer Tools.zip
43 – Intro to Selections.zip
50 – Intro to Cleanup Tools.zip
58 – Intro to Shapes and Text.zip
63 – Intro to Smart Objects.zip
69 – Intro to Image Transforming.zip
74 – Intro to Actions.zip
81 – Filters.zip
88 – Intro to Editing Video.zip
96 – Custom Effects.zip
102 – Natural Retouching.zip
107 – Intro to Portrait Workflow.pdf
110 – Intro to Landscape Workflow.zip
112 – Intro to Compositing.zip
115 – Rothko and Interfaces (Bonus Video).zip
33 – Intro to Masks and Brushes.zip
106 - Frequency Separation.zip

Ratings and Reviews

a Creativelive Student
 

Amazing course, but don't be fooled into thinking this is a beginner's course for photographers. The problem isn't Blake's explanations; they're top. The problem is the vast scope of this course and the order in which the topics are presented. Take layers for example. When I was first learning Photoshop (back when we learned from books), I found I learned little or nothing from, for example, books that covered layers before they covered how to improve/process photographs. These books taught me how to organize, move, and link layers before they showed me what a layer was actually for. Those books tended to teach me everything there is to know about layers (types of layers, how to organize them, how to move them, how to move them two at a time, how to move them two at a time even if there are other layers between the two you're interested in, useful troubleshooting tips, etc. ) all before I even know (from a photographer's point of view) what it is the things actually do. The examples of organizing, linking, and moving mean everything for graphic designers from Day One, but for photographers not so much. Blake does the same thing as those books. Topics he covers extremely early demand a lot of theoretical imagination for a photographer who doesn't already know quite a bit about what he is talking about. Learning about abstract things first and concrete things later only makes PS that much harder to understand. If you AREN'T a beginner, however, this course is amazing. I thought it would be like an Army Bootcamp, taking you from zero and building you into a fit, competent Photoshop grunt. Now I think it's more like Army Bootcamp for high school varsity jocks. It isn't going to take you from the beginning, but the amount you'll get out of it is nonetheless more than your brain can imagine. I've been using PS for years to improve my photographs, and even to create the odd artistic composite or two. The amount I've learned in the first week is amazing, and every day I learn something -- more like many things -- which I immediately implement to improve my productivity and/or widen the horizons of what I can achieve. If you ARE a photographer who's a Photoshop beginner, I'd take very seriously the advice Blake gives in the introduction: Watch one lesson, and practice the skills and principles you learn in that one lesson for two weeks. THEN watch the next lesson. You can't do that of course without buying the course, so it's up to you to decide whether you'd like to learn Photoshop and master Photoshop all from the same course. Learning it first and mastering it later will cost more money, but I think you'll understand everything better and have a much more enjoyable ride in the process. As for me? I'm going to have to find the money to buy this course. There is simply way too much content in each lesson for me to try to take on all at once, but on the other hand I don't want to miss anything at all that he has to share.

Robert Andrews
 

Blake Rudis is the absolute best in teaching photoshop. His knowledge and how he presents the instruction is clear and concise - there is NO ONE BETTER. Yes, his classes require some basic skills, and maybe I'd organize the order of (or group) the classes in a different order, but, let me be clear - if anyone is to be successful or famous in the Photoshop world, it should be Blake Rudis. I strongly recommend his teaching. I started photography and post processing in 2018, and because of this class, I'm know what Im doing. The energy you get when you create something beautiful is profound, it makes you bounce out of bed (at 4AM) like a 5 year old, to go create. It's a great ride! Thanks Blake, & Thanks Creative live.

Esther Gambrell
 

WOW!!! I've been purchasing CL classes for several years now and have watched HOURS of "How-To Photoshop" classes, but this is the first one I've actually purchased because of the AWESOME BONUS content!!! SERIOUSLY??!!?!? A PLUG-IN??? But not only that, Blake is SO easy to understand, and he breaks down concepts in different ways to connect with different people's learning styles. I REALLY appreciated this approach because I am a LEFT-BRAINED creative that has an engineering background, so I really connected to what Blake was saying. THANK YOU FOR THAT! There are TONS of Photoshop courses out there, but I found this one to be the most helpful in they way Blake teaches concepts so that you know WHY you're doing what your doing. I feel like he taught me how to fish with Photoshop to feed me for a lifetime instead of just giving me a fish to feed me for one day. This is the BEST overall PS course out there!!! Thank you!!!!

Student Work

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