Continuing on with the usefulness of Actions in action, today we’ll take a look at combining a Photoshop action with the rule of thirds, I’ll show you how to see and crop perfectly to the rule of thirds, easily and every time.
Tutorials are widely disseminated around the web and it’s often hard to pin point their origin, all I can say is I first came across this from Lese Snider King.
Basically the Rule of Thirds, encourages you to split the picture into three vertically and horizontally and place the main points of interest in your picture where possible on the points these lines intersect, called power points. The idea being that the brain is drawn to these points and the viewer will find an image composed in such away as to be balanced and visually appealing. Of course rules are meant to be broken and not slavishly adhered to in all circumstances.
The best place to do any cropping of a picture is in the camera, taking the time to really look through the viewfinder, right out to the corners and to ‘see' that image before pressing the shutter. With landscape photography on a tripod, this should always be possible, also with traditional wedding group shots, but with candid wedding shots, street photography, sports etc the time you have to frame the shot is limited and you are often only focusing on the main subject.
It is in these situations, that we rely on post processing to do the cropping.
Step 1
Now we get around to recording the action, with the actions window open, click on the folder button to create a new set of actions.
Step 2
Change the name in the resulting popup to describe the action/set of actions you are recording, in this case I have called it “Size to 10 x 8”
Step 3
Next click on the new action button, which brings up the new action dialogue box in which you should once again change the name. After hitting the ‘Record’ button, everything you do until you hit the stop recording will be recorded
Notice that the record icon has now turned red, to indicate that it is recording.
All of the above steps are generic to recording any action, now we come to the steps that are specific to this action
Step 4
To be able to see the grid that we will draw, firstly change your foreground colour to red, then we need to select one of the custom shape tools. These are nested under the rectangle tool.
Step 5
Next move to the drop down shape box at the top of the screen and select the grid tool
Step 6
If the Info dialogue isn’t open, open it by clicking Window > Info, then draw out the grid anywhere over the picture paying attention to the size in the Info Box
Here I have drawn the grid out to 10 x 8, I’ll admit that it takes a steady hand to get any where close to the exact size but as you are recording an action, you’ll only need to get it right once, so persevere.
Step 7
Click stop recording button. We have now a saved 10 x 8 template. You can follow the above steps to make crop templates for other common sizes such as 6 x 4, 7 x 5 etc
That’s all the hard work done, now select the move tool and move the grid over the image to highlight the power points and to select the area you wish to crop to.
Not every image will have a crop that perfectly suggests the rule of thirds. Here I have placed the right vertical power point on the building, the left one then falls on the water fall. The top horizontal lines fall on the wall across the top of the water fall, leaving the bottom on near the fence.
Step 8
Select the crop tool and draw the crop around the grid, then hit enter/return to complete the crop.
Step 9
Drag the layer with the grid on to the bin.
You are left with the final image
Next week, I’ll take a final look at actions, and suggest a number of small actions that can be of use to the likes of wedding photographers and montage makers
Linear Mode
