Actions, a final look

This week we are going to take a final look for now at actions. The last couple of weeks hopefully have shown you an introduction to actions that can be simple or a little more complicated. Today we’re going to create a template that is reusable, and customizable and hopefully inspirational for you to try your own templates. We’ll also look at a few simple action tools that can work with this template.

Below you can see the original, the finished product as well as an extra step all of which can be achieved in about three clicks.


I’m not a wedding photographer, these images are being used purely for illustration purposes.




Step 1
The first step with any image is to carry out any adjustments that are needed. The result of which is that you will most likely end up with an image in Photoshop with a number of layers.



Prior to recording the action, flatten the layers, which will leave you with the Background Layer.



Step 2
Click on the new action set button, and name the set something like ‘Portrait Template Actions’ I have named my set Tropix Set as I’ll be saving a series of actions related to this tutorial here
Click on the New Action Button and name the action, ‘Template’
(Screen shots of these steps can be found in the previous two tutorials.)


Finally click the record button, everything is now being recorded.

Step 3
Duplicate the current layer which can either be done by holding down the Command/control key and pressing the J key or alternatively from the layer > new layer via copy.

Step 4
With the new layer active, we then need to scale the image, from Edit > Transform > Scale




Now from the scale options at the top of the screen, enter 70% and 70% in the width and height boxes, then click on the tick or press enter to confirm the change.




The image will now appear like this




Step 5
It would be an advantage if any changes we made from this point on could be editable as we do not know the exact image we will be working on. The way to achieve this is to convert the layer to a smart object, via Filter > Convert for Smart Filters




Step 6
Click on the fx button at the bottom of the layers palette and select Stroke




This brings up the layers style dialogue box.



We are now going to make changes to a few of the layer style options to have the smaller image appear to rise off the page. As we have converted to a smart object, all these changes are editable at a later date.

Step 7
To change the Stroke options, first make sure that the blend mode is set to Normal, the default setting is screen which works with some settings but not all.

Then click on the red Color swatch and in the resulting dialogue, change the color to black. I have changed the size of the stroke from 3 to 4 and the position form outside to inside which squares off the corners.



The image should now look like this



Step 8
We’ll now add a vignette like affect by using the inner glow, where we will change the settings to blend mode to normal, color to black, and size to 49.






Step 9
The final change to the layer effects is to change the outer glow. The settings should be blend mode to normal, color to yellow, and size to 8.





Step 10
A final step I like to take at this stage is to convert the base layer to a smart object as we did above and then apply a Gaussian blur of about 4 pixels

Step 11
At this stage, click stop record as we are finished recording the action. Your image will look a little like the one below, except that the inner image will not be rotated.






To rotate the image involves an extra step that is best recorded as a separate action.



Step 12
With the top layer active, click to start recording a new action, and name this new action CCW for counter clockwise.

Click Edit > Transform > Rotate

In the box below, enter –10 then click the tick box





Now stop recording and you have a new action to rotate an image 10 degrees counter clockwise! To record an action to rotate 10 degrees clockwise CW repeat the above but leave out the minus sign.



At this point, I’m going to suggest that you also record a couple more simple actions that will work on this template to move the top layer around so you can position it just so.

They are Move 1cm left / right / up / down.
To do this, record a new action called 1cm Up, with the top layer active click record then push the up arrow on your keyboard 71 times, then stop recording. Repeat for down, left and right.

The last two are Undo and Redo.

For Undo, start recording, then go File > Step Backwards then stop recording and yes you guessed it for Redo, start recording, then go File > Step Forwards.

Now you have a powerful set of actions that you can use to create and manipulate a template for a wedding picture or any other picture you like. Hopefully with what you have learned in this tutorial and the last two, you can now use the power of Photoshop actions to make your life easier.


Oh I nearly forgot the last step to change out the picture on the top layer, an idea I first saw demonstrated by that wonderful Photoshop guru and friend, Mark Johnson.

As we are using smart objects, and made the second layer via layer copy rather than duplicate layers, the two layers in our document may look the same but do in fact operate independently of each other.

Step 13
With the top layer active, go to Layer > Smart Objects >Replace Contents






From the resulting popup box, select a new image to replace the existing one and click the Place button








To make the actions that we have recorded easier to use, don’t forget to switch to button mode in CS3






The actions created today, are available as a download by clicking this link