Chapter 23: Automating the Process

Overview

When working in Photoshop, you often repeat tasks . For example, if you publish a lot of work on the Web, you might regularly convert files from PSD to JPEG format. Here s another: Let s say you want to place all of the images in a folder into a single document to make a contact sheet for comparison. Opening, sizing, and pasting the images can be tedious , time-consuming work.

Building a website is a lot of work too. Wouldn t it be nice if there was some way to accomplish this by simply pressing a button? This chapter is about Photoshop s magic buttons called Actions and automations. These operations can greatly accelerate your work flow by automatically performing tedious and repetitious tasks. You can perform most Actions and automations on either single or multiple documents, and you can save them and store them for later use.

You ll learn about these topics:

• Setting up an Action

• Applying Actions to a batch of images

• Creating contact sheets, picture packages, and a Web photo gallery

• Creating Droplets