Monday, April 28, 2008

Photoshop: Using Actions

Actions can be quite neat when your feeling a bit lazy or don't have the experience with Photoshop to render certain effects to your image. As today i m feeling rather lazy and tired so i m just going to do a quick right up.

Here is how to use those actions that you downloaded:

T "Now that I have this action, what do I do with it?" All actions on this come in zip folders, and you need a program that unzips it, such as WinZip or StuffIt Expander to extract the ATN file.

Once unzipped, we recommend placing all your actions in a common folder. This folder can be placed anywhere on your system. It does not have to be in your Photoshop subdirectory. In Windows, for instance, you could create a special folder under My Documents called "Actions."

Once you have established that folder, open Photoshop, open the actions palette, click the small triangle in the upper right hand corner to access the fly-out menu, and choose LOAD ACTIONS. Using the file dialogue, navigate to wherever you have placed our actions, in our case, "\my documents\actions". Click the "Load" button in the dialogue and your actions are in the actions palette.

There is a simpler way that is not as organized, but that I use all the time. After unzipping your action, simply drag and drop it onto the actions palette in Photoshop. (The palette must be open for this to work.)


At AtnCentral you can get loads of free actions

A very important side note:

Using these Actions in Commercial Images (info from AntCentral)

We've received a number of questions from professional designers and photographers wanting to know if they can use these actions in their commercial work. As long as you have rights to the original image, how you use these actions is up to you.

An action is really a series of instructions to Photoshop to perform various steps in a set sequence. Some call for decisions from the users, others don't. No action does anything you couldn't do on your own if you had the time, knowledge, and patience. So have at it.

What you may not do is package these actions as your own work, whether for free or for sale. We do know of cases where that has happened.

2 comments:

Graham Pakiam said...

Cool! I had no idea there was such a feature. Thanks Alex!

Alexander Blacker said...

No problem Graham, my pleasure to help :)