Visitors to VTC.com will be able to view all introductory videos for each training course.
Free Trial Members will gain access to first three chapters for each training course.
Full Access Members have full access to VTC.com�s entire library of video tutorials.
An action in short is simply a timesaver, what an action will do is watch you work and it will record various steps and then when you finish with that action you can then play it back on something else. Now here's the default actions that come in the action panel and these are the ones created for you by the good people at Adobe and I'm gonna give you an example as to what an action actually does. Here's one called molten lead, so I'm going twirl it down to show that there is stuff in there, there's all kinds of steps in here. I'm gonna click once on the words molten lead and then I am gonna click the playback button right here. And then in a moment this image is going to turn into molten lead. There you go, that's an example of an action and it plays back very, very quickly. So I'm gonna twirl that back up and I'm gonna twirl this up as well and I am also going to revert this image. Because we are going to create our very own action as well as our own action set. And that's what this folder is that contains these actions, its an action set. So I'm gonna put this folder right here in the actions panel and by the way if you don't see this actions panel don't forget go to the window menu and choose actions. I'm gonna call this set snowy. So if I do any snow effects it'll go in this folder. Now I'm gonna click here to create a brand new action and I'm gonna call it tundra. And I'm also gonna make sure that my snowy set is the one that is selected, not the default actions which would be this folder here. I'm gonna give this guy a blue color and I'm not going to assign a function key because I like to press the play button and have more control. So I'm gonna hit record and now the red light is on. Unlike the series 24 with Jack Bauer always needing more time, we can take our time on this, Photoshop won't do anything unless you actually perform some kind of step or operation. So I'm gonna sit here for a minute. Alright. Now I'm gonna go to my image menu and I'm gonna choose adjustments and I'm gonna choose variations. I'm going to add some more cyan to this image and some more blue until I get a nice blue effect here. I'm gonna click OK and look at the actions panel, you see that it recorded the variations and it also put the color. How cool is that? Now let's keep going, I'm going to now add a new layer and once again it's going to be recorded. I'm gonna hide that and show you that it says make layer. On this layer I'm gonna twirl this and switch it to my uh white swatch to be the foreground color. I'm gonna go to filter, I'm gonna choose noise, add noise. Ok let's make sure I am on the correct layer, hold on. And I'm gonna fill this first of all with this white color. So me fill that with white and once again that step is recorded, it says fill. Now let's go to noise, noise add noise and here's some noise ok. And let's see which one looks better here, I'm gonna use the uniform and now I'm going to add a blur, so I'm gonna go to filter, blur, motion blur and that looks pretty good. Let me see how much or little I want to add to this. That looks good. I'm gonna click OK and now I'm going to change the blended mode of this layer. So I'm gonna make sure I'm on my snow layer, I'm gonna actually rename it and I'm going to change it into screen so I can kind of see back there. I am also going to lower the opacity of this layer ok. So I am going to hide my layers and let's see what we have here. Here are all the steps that I applied so far. Now I am going to stop this action and save it so I'm gonna hit stop and the action has been recorded, it's done. So I'm gonna twirl that up and now we are gonna go to another image which I have already open which is of the snowboarder. Let me move this panel over a little bit. So here's the guy on the snowboard, let me move that over, here's my snowy and I'm gonna click on the very first step here. You notice if I click on the folder these button don't illuminate but if I click on tundra the name of the action I can now press the play button. I'll press play, that will go through all the steps and in a moment, look at that. All the steps we applied in the other document are now on this one. Let's take a look at the layers, see that it even created a snow layer for me just like in the other uh document. So that's what an action will do for you, it will slowly but surely record every step you take and then it will allow you to apply it to not just one image but an entire folder of images if you want to.
| Course: | Adobe Photoshop CS3 |
| Author: | Dwayne Ferguson |
| SKU: | 33782 |
| ISBN: | 1-933736-98-4 |
| Release Date: | 2007-08-02 |
| Duration: | 9 hrs / 161 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |