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Lesson Info

Modifying Actions After You Record Them

So you see there I said select RGB channel, and then I said set current layer, I changed the name, and then I set the curve. There are four things happening in this one action, when in reality, this whole thing can actually be minimized down into one thing. So this is where we get into modifying the actions. So if I go ahead and delete all of these, just click on this one and click on this one, notice how I said annotate everything? 'Cause this is the time where I would pull out a piece of paper and say, "Okay, what did I do here?". I went ahead and I changed this to new curve, and then I changed the curve to an S curve. Okay, cool. I'm gonna delete these, just grab all these, and click and drag and delete. What it doesn't show you here, is that this actually has actions inside that action, that are happening. If I click the dropdown on there, it's saying make a new adjustment layer, using adjustment layer, which is using that, type is gonna be curves, and the kind is just gonna be a d...

efault curve. Watch what happens when I double-click on this. Boom. The record button starts. And then I get the new layer, and I get the ability to name this. I'll call it new curve. Here I can also change the color of that curve. I can change the color of that curve to maybe violet, 'cause I like to make my effects basically, we'll just call this new S curve, how about that? And I can even change the opacity here if I wanted to. The minute I press okay, it's gonna open up the curves dialog, and now I can make an S curve. I can make the darks darker, I can make the lights lighter, press okay, and all of that got recorded in there. Because I double-clicked on this area, it knew, only edit this area. Now look what happens. Use adjustment layer, call it new S curve, make the color violet, preset was custom, 'cause this is the custom S curve that we chose, and it even tells you the points that are on that curve, after that curve is made. So now if I delete this layer, and I press Shift + F2, look at that, we have a new S curve. It's all been recorded into one action. Now the reason why I tell you this, is because we talked about that foreign language thing, let's say I'm building a new action, I'm building upon this action let's say. I'll just click on here and I'll press record, and I'll click right here and do that. You see how this says select layer, and then in quotes, it says new S curve? Well I named this thing S curve, so any version of Photoshop, no matter what platform its on, Dutch, Spanish, English, it's going to name that new S curve regardless of language, because I told it to select that language. Now the problem that you run into if you're developing anything for people outside of the English language, is that if by chance, I had a layer in here, called curves one, which is just a regular curves adjustment layer, and I recorded the action to select, let's see, to select that curves one, curves one is not gonna be curves one when a curve is initially called up in a different language. It's gonna be whatever curve is in that language, and one. So if you record and action that selects curves one, and their version of Photoshop doesn't speak English, it's gonna stop, and it's not gonna do it. It's gonna say, bong, and your gonna get that stinking error message that comes up. That's exactly what happened with me when I had my new panel, my first panel that I created. I had a bunch of actions in there that when you pressed a button, it would select a specific action that was built from the English language. If, by chance, you select that layer, double-click inside here, and rename that new S curve, inside there just like we did, you won't run into that problem. But if you're telling it to select the default curves one, or gradient map one, or hue saturation one, well hue saturation in German is gonna be totally different than hue saturation in English, so keep that in mind. That's why I tell you best practice is, if you make a new adjustment layer, always double-click on it in here before you even keep going, and rename it. And what we're gonna do to set that up, so you do things correct, is we're gonna go ahead and just delete all this. We can delete this basic action, we don't necessarily need it. I'm gonna make a new action, and we're gonna call this action curves dodge and burn. So now what I'm gonna do is exactly what we did before. I'm gonna make two curves adjustment layers. One curve, two curves, but I'm not gonna do anything with them. That's all I'm gonna do, okay? Now I'm gonna stop. Why am I stopping? Because I need to rename this dodge and burn. So if I double-click inside this make adjustment layer, I'm gonna call this dodge, that's my first one. The color, if you want a differentiate the colors on these, so that dodge is one color, and burn is another color, that's up to you. I'm gonna go ahead and just make them red, so that I know that I need to do something with that mask. Red, to me, is a color that I use when I'm building my actions, so that I know that I need to do something to it, that it's not just an effect. Purple to me is an effect, whereas red is hey, you gotta do something with this. And press okay. What do I need to do with this, well I'm dodging with this one, so I'll make it brighter. Press okay. Now you'll notice that it made a whole new curve on top of here, even though I didn't record anything else to happen, because these curves were already made, right in here. What it's doing when I rename this one, is it's just gonna build another one on top, and that's okay, just leave it the way it is. So now I'll click on the next layer down, this make adjustment layer, double-click, and call it burn. Change the color to something like red, press okay, pull that down, press okay. So now I can delete all the stuff that's happening here, I can just click Shift, click on the bottom one, and delete. And now if I press play on this curves dodge and burn, I get those curves dodge and burn layers, right? But, from what we know about curves dodge and burn layers, I need to invert these masks. So what I'm gonna do, is I'm gonna press record, I'm gonna press Command or Control + I, because that is already selected right now. Then I'm gonna click on this dodge mask, Command or Control + I, and invert them, and then stop. We got quotes here, that's a stopping point. If we see quotes, we need to ask ourself, "Did I name this dodge?". Yes I did, I named it here. So I don't need to worry about that now if I'm working in another version of Photoshop, so Dutch or German or whatever. So now when I delete these, if I go ahead and press play on this, we have our curves dodge and burn action already set up for us, and all we would need to do in here, is just start painting our mask in here with a brush. You can take this a step further though. So now that we got this dodge here, we got this burn here, I can click on this action at the bottom, I could press record, and because this is already selected, and I know that it's already selected because I just ran that action, if I press and hold Shift then click on burn, I can press Control + G, put them into a group. Command or Control + G and they're in a group. And then I can stop it. I don't need to rename that group right now, because if I were to try and rename that group, guess what would happen? Group one is in English here, 'cause that's what the default group one is gonna be, but if I were to have my action record me selecting that group one and changing the name of it, we might run into some issues when we come into foreign languages in Photoshop. So what I'm gonna do, instead of pressing record and doing that, this can be treated just like any of these other layers. If I double-click, I can change this, from group one to curves dodge and burn. Change that color to red, and press okay, and then stop. I can delete all these that are happening here. Now if I press play on this action, we have it in a group. So anytime, once we're done with this, you can have this curves dodge and burn, I'll put this in the downloads too, so you can check your work as you're going along with me when you build this, 'cause that's what I'm gonna expect of you, (laughs) if you wanna do it right. Alright, we can even take that a step further too. Let's say, our brush tool was not selected, and let's say our clone stamp tool was selected. At the bottom of this, after I say make group, I can press record, and I can press B for the brush tool, and it will select the brush. That way, if I was anywhere else in my workflow, if I was using the move tool, or I was moving the content aware whatever tool, if I was using the clone stamp tool, no matter what tool I'm using, once I press stop, we'll check it, I'll click on the dodge tool, come back to the top and press play. And look at that, automatically selected by brush tool. So now it's setting me up for success. I told you, you could use these anytime. It sets your workflow up for efficiency, right? No matter what tool you were using before, we're still gonna be on our brush tool, and we're gonna get to move on, because now all I'd have to do is close down my actions, open up that group, click on that burn layer right there, and start burning areas in by brushing with black, or going down to the dodge, making areas brighter on this tree. My tongue's about to start hanging out, hmm. (laughs) But again, we can even take that even further. So, what I'm gonna do, is I'm gonna press play on this, now I'm gonna press record, now I'm gonna press the dropdown arrow on this group, and I'm gonna select that mask, and press stop. Now let's press play. Now I'm making myself even more efficient. I don't even have to check the box anymore. I'm just ready to go, I'm ready to burn. See that? Ready to burn. Burning, dodging, all kinds of way you can speed up your workflow like this. The curves layer dodge and burn is one of my favorites. The one that's included in this panel is actually gonna be more of your regular dodge and burn layer. So these are essentially actions that are in this panel, so if I press play on this dodge and burn, it's gonna pop up, and it's gonna, see this right here, this is called a stop action, and if I go ahead and press continue, it'll let me go. There's other things in here. They have what we call modal dialogs, and I'll get into that in a second. So like this one that's called radiance, it's gonna bring up a stop action, and then it's gonna pop open gaussian blur, and stop me, so it's not actually recorded in there, and that's what we're gonna get into next. So it's basically gonna say hey, I need you to do something with this gaussian blur layer.