Adobe Photoshop CS3 Tutorials
Automation / Droplets
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.
Learn More
Subtitles of the Movie (Adobe Photoshop CS3 / Automation / Droplets)
Droplets are a nifty little feature that allows you to use an action to create a mini application. So what we're going to do is we're going to first of all record an action and apply some special effects to this borg that I created in Zbrush and then we're going to take that action and turn it into a mini application. And the cool thing is, you can use this on a Mac and a PC. And I'm going to tell you how to, if you own a Macintosh, share your droplet with the Windows PC user and vice-versa. So let's go ahead and get started. I'm going to go to my window menu and I'm going to choose actions. Alright. Here's our actions panel. And I'm going to go right down here and create a brand new action. I'm going to call this one borgify. And, as you can see here, I can choose to put it my default action or any set that I create. I'm also going to give this guy a color. So I'm going to give it green, which is appropriate because the borg turned you kind of green. And if you don't know what a borg is, by the way, those are those aliens on Star Trek that kind of go around the galaxy and assimilate people by force. You really don't have much of a choice because if the borg want you to become a borg, guess what? You're going to be a borg. And now I'm going to hit record. Now I'm going to go and apply a special effect so I'm going to put a watercolor effect on here and wait for the panel to appear and I'm going to accept that and I'm going to go to another filter and I'm going to put a little bit of a distortion on it. So we'll put a little twirl on this filter and that's going to be enough for now. So here's my action and I'm going to stop that action and that's all we need to do for this part because we're going to go now to our final menu and we're going to choose automate and right up here we're going to choose create droplet. Now, the create droplet dialog box appears and as you see here, we have a lot of choices. The first thing I'm going to do is choose to save my droplet on my desktop and I'm going to call if borgify drop, save it, then I can choose which action to use. So I can once again choose a set, but I have it already in default actions and I can choose the, uh, new action I created which is called borgify or I can choose any of the other actions that are here. I'm going to choose borgify for this example. Then what I can do is choose a destination folder. So I'm going to choose folder and I'm going to create in my desktop a new folder called borgified. And this will be the artwork that goes in here. So that's going to be my folder and I'm doing to leave everything else at the default. As you see here, it's going to give me my document name and the extension. I'm also going to make sure that this file is compatible with Windows. The Mac OS is ghosted out because this is the operating system I'm creating the droplet on. I'm going to hit OK and now what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you that I have this image open here, ok, and I'm going to save this guy on my desktop just to give you an example of what I'm going to do here. So I'm going to go to desktop. I'll call this snowboarder. And then I'm going to hide Photoshop and show you what happens when we drag this guy right to the droplet. So once again, here's our new droplet. Borgify drop. Here is the image it's going to borgify when I drag it on top of this droplet. And it's going to go into this folder. As you see, I open it to show you there's nothing in here, alright? So I'm going to drag the snowboarder onto the drop, wait one second and the filter is applied and I'm going to go back to, I'm going to hide Photoshop and I'm going to show you that the new artwork is in here and I'm going to drag this to Photoshop to show you pretty much what happened to it. See that? The twirl and the watercolor effect are applied because that's what the drop will do. Now that we know how to create a drop, let me tell you how to share this with a Windows PC owner. The first thing you have to do for Windows PCs is just go to the end of it and double click or just very slowly click so you can actually change the name and add the .exe extension at end and that's all you need for the Windows people to be able to use this. Now, [00:03:37 ] if this was created on a Windows PC and want to give it to your Macintosh friends, Mac people just drag the droplet right on top of the Photoshop CS3 icon and that will convert it so that you can use it. So, just to reiterate, a droplet is simply a custom application that you can create so that whenever you drop one image or a folder of images on top of it, it will perform the action that you specified when you created the actions in Photoshop CS3.
Tutorial Information
| 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 |
VTC Sign up & Benefits
- Unlimited Access
- 81,350 Video Tutorials (14,200 free)
- Video Available as Flash or QuickTime
- Over 715 Courses
- $30 for One Month Access
- Multi-User Discounts Available
