Lessons

Lesson Info

Automation Techniques in Adobe Photoshop

Yeah. If you find yourself doing repetitive things where you end up following the exact same steps over and over again, you might wanna look into automation to see if it's something that you can turn into an action. Then a multi step process can turn into something as simple as clicking on the name of an action and then hitting play. Let's see what it takes to make actions in Photoshop. Let's start with something relatively simple. What I'd like to do is take this image and I would like to make a reflected copy of it so that we have an image that looks just like this on the right side, but it's reflected like a mirror horizontally and then maybe do the same thing vertically after that. In other words, it could look like this and I just want to feed it the image, hit the play button and have it do all this work. So let's figure out how it would be done. Well, we're gonna start off by opening our image and I'm gonna go to the window menu and choose actions. I already have a bunch of acti...

ons in here. If you haven't worked with him before you most likely only have a folder up here called default actions down at the bottom. I'm gonna create a brand new folder to store the actions that we make during this video and I'm just gonna call mine now just so I know why it's there. You can name it whatever you want then to create an action. I come down here and hit this plus sign and it asked me to name it and I'm gonna call this reflect right? He wants to know which one of these folders. I'd like to save it in. And if I already had this one clicked on at the time, I made the action, it'll already be chosen. But if I didn't, I'd have to click here. And this is a list of all those folders. I just need to choose which one to put it in. Then you can ignore this stuff down here for now. But if you wanted to, you could make your actions different colors. So in here, you might have creative actions as red, production actions as blue and so on. You can also set up a function key that you would press to run the action, but I don't usually mess with that stuff. So now I'm gonna click record and at this point, you have to start being very careful because whatever you do is gonna be recorded as part of that action. So you don't wanna just play around you wanna make sure you cover the exact steps needed to create your effect. So you might wanna practice ahead of time with whatever effect it is to refine the steps. But I think this one is relatively easy. What I'm gonna do is select all. Then I'm gonna copy this to its own layer. One way of doing that is to type command J to jump it to a new layer. Then I'm gonna flip that layer horizontally. I can do so by going to the edit menu, choosing transform. And there's a choice called flip horizontal. Then what I'd like to do is move that to the right until the left edge of the photograph ends up being over here where the right edge is now, there'd be many ways of doing that. One way you might think of is to use the move tool. And if I use the move tool, I could click and drag like this. If I hold shift, it'll make sure it's going in a straight line. So I don't accidentally move it up or down in those little pink guides that are known as smart guides. The moment it ends up touching the edge of the photo, I should see a smart guide right there to let me know it precisely aligns with that edge of the photo. So I'll let go. Then I want to be able to see that thing that I just dragged outside of this document. So I'm gonna go to the image menu and I'm gonna choose reveal all. And now we have that. Finally, I want to merge that down because if I don't, I might see a little seam here. And so I'm just gonna go to the layer menu and I'm gonna choose merge down. Now, if that was off the littlest bit, I'll still see the seam, but we'll see if I zoom up. You can see the seam actually isn't there. It would have been right here. And if I zoom out, it's just some weird artifact of it trying to redraw the screen. So now that is my action that I wanted to create. My first one, we'll create another one that would also reflect it downward. But first, we gotta make sure this one works. So at the bottom of my actions panel, I'm gonna hit the stop button. So it no longer records the steps that I'm working on and let's take a look at those steps and make sure that they would be universally applicable. So it wouldn't matter if this was a color picture or a black and white. And it wouldn't matter if this image was two inches wide or 200 inches wide, it would still work. So here we have set selection, there's a little disclosure triangle. Here you can click to expand that and it says, OK, we're gonna select all, then we're gonna do layer via copy, that's cool. Then we're going to flip horizontal. That sounds great. And then move current layer. Ah this is gonna be an issue right now. It says move current layer but it recorded it in inches. So what if the image I decide to apply this to is 14 inches wide? Well, then if it's gonna move the layer 7. inches, that's not gonna be right. Somehow I need to get this step to be different. So what I'm gonna do is click on that step so that I could record a new step. And let's see if we can figure out how to make it work. Well, the first thing I need to do is realize why did it use inches? Well, the reason why it used inches is because my rulers are set to inches. You can type command R or come up here to the view menu and choose rulers to get them to show up. And I can see that these aren't inches and yes, this is seven point whatever inches wide. So what I'm gonna do is just type command Z enough times so that I'm back to the point where it hadn't moved yet. So I think that was about three steps ago and I think I'm back there because this looks like the flipped version in its original position. Then I'm gonna go up to the rulers and I'm gonna right click on them and that's how you can choose the measurement system. Well, if I use pixels inches centimeters millimeters points or Picas, then it's gonna be specific to the size of the document it was originally recorded in. But if I choose percent, then when I move it over, it could be recorded as 100% of the width of this document. And that would be universal. So it wouldn't matter if I started with a two inch wide document or a inch wide document, 100% of the width would still always be the full width of that document. So now that I have the rulers set up the way I want them to be, I no longer need the ruler to be visible. You're welcome to leave it there, but I just don't like the clutter of it. So all type of command are to hide it. Now, we're gonna replace this step in our action with one that's recorded as percentages. So we've chosen undue enough times to get back to the point that we were at right here before we moved a layer. Now, I'm gonna hit the record button, then it's gonna start paying attention to what I'm doing and I'm gonna use the move tool. I'm gonna click within the image here and I'm gonna drag to the right, just like I did before I'll hold down the shift key and I'm gonna get it over there until I see that smart guide snap right to the edge like that. And it even tells me, if you look at the little overlay that's right near my mouse. It shows that I moved it to the right and it says 100%. So I'm gonna let go. Now, what it should have done is down here. It should have just added a step because I moved that layer and when you have it turned on or record, it should be adding steps here. I'm not sure why it didn't let me turn off the visibility of this layer and see if that causes a step. Yeah, weird. I don't think that step was there a second ago but I'm gonna hit stop. I didn't need to hide the layer. So I'll throw that step away. I just didn't notice this step show up until I hit the layer and it should have. So maybe I missed it. Who knows? I'm gonna expand that and let's compare these two. Now, this one was moving at 7.113 inches, whereas this one moves at 100%. So I'll take the old step and I'll throw it in the trash. I just need to make sure that that's in the right order here. So after it moves it over, it looks like we do a reveal all. So you'd see everything and then we merge those layers together. So I think we fix this up so this action could apply to any image. Let's test it. I'll go to the file menu. I'm gonna choose revert. And therefore we're back to the original image with no layers. I'll click on the name of the action here and I'm gonna hit play to see if it works. Now, the one thing it doesn't do and I wish it would is when it's done, I wish I could type command zero and that means fit in window so I can really see the end result. Well, even if I was recording the action and while I was, I typed command zero, it wouldn't have been recorded. Why? That's because actions only record steps that have the potential of modifying the image, you know, of making a difference in that image in zooming out until you can see the whole image that wouldn't change its contents. So it would be completely ignored in here. But you can still add steps like that. You just have to do it in a different way. So I'm gonna click on the last step here because I want to add a new one afterwards. And I'm gonna go to the side menu of the actions panel and in there, I'm gonna find a choice that is called insert menu item. When I choose that this little thing pops up and it's just waiting for me to choose from the menu up here in whatever it is I choose, regardless if it would affect the contents of an image or not, it's gonna be added to my action. So I'll go to the view menu and I'm gonna choose fit on screen and right there, it tells me what it recorded. I'll click. OK? And now we have that additional step at the end of our action. And therefore when it's done, it'll always zoom out so you can see the whole thing. All right. Now, let's make this action. So it flips not only horizontally, but it flips vertically as well. Now to do that, I don't want to go through all these steps again. So all I'm gonna do is duplicate this action right here and we'll start with the same beginning steps. So I'll just go up here to the side menu of the actions panel and right there, I'm gonna find a choice called duplicate. I just need to make sure the name of that action was highlighted before choosing this. And now I'm gonna have a second version. I'm gonna rename this by double clicking on its name and I'm just gonna call it reflect right and down and let's collapse our original action just so we don't have a lot of clutter in here. And right now, I think we're at the point of the end of that first action. So that means if I just click on the last step here and then I hit record, we can just add on to it. So now what I'm gonna do is very similar steps to what we had done before. I'm going to select all then I'm going to make a copy of that layer by typing command J I think of that as jumping to a new layer, I'll go up to the edit menu, choose transform. And I'm gonna flip vertical this time. Then I'll use the move tool. And this time I'm gonna move this all the way down here to the bottom. I'm holding shift that makes sure I don't move the littlest bit left or right. And I'll get there right until that pink line appears at the bottom of the document. I'll let go and then I need to go to the image menu and choose, reveal all. Now, I can see the rest. And then the only other thing is I don't need it as separate layers. So I'll go to the layer menu and I'm gonna choose merge down. So it combines with the layer that's below. Then I can hit the stop button here in my action. And there's only one other thing I need to do and that is if you look through our action, do you remember? I added that step that said fit on screen. Well, it's still in its original position, which is right after we did the flip to the right. And I'd rather have that uh happen at the end of this action. So I'm gonna click on that step and I'm just gonna drag it down here to make it the last step. Now let's test our action to test an action. I usually go to the file menu and I choose, revert, that's gonna bring our image back to what it looked like before we touched it. It's as if you close the image and choose, don't save and then you reopen it. Now, let's click on the name of the action and let's hit the play button. Cool. Look at how fast that was. Now, I can have this, do all sorts of things like that. In fact, I do have actions that are called flip, right. I have another one called flip left and I have one called flip right and down, left and down. You know, all those kinds of variations and all it had to do with is duplicating an action like this one and modifying the individual steps that would be needed. Although you could always start from scratch each time if you feel more comfortable doing that. So that's pretty cool. Let's try it on a different image that might be at a different size. So here I'll choose reflect right and down and I'm just gonna hit play. Look at that. I could even press it again and again and again and get a bunch of them. Or if I choose revert and I just wanted a whole row of them, I'll just reflect right and hit play and then hit play, hit, play, hit play, get it to go on forever in that direction. Let's close that and let's make another action one. That's kind of weird. What I'm gonna do is create a new action and I'm just gonna call this odd image maker hit record. And now with that, you notice it ended up here up in default actions. That's because I didn't have this folder selected at the time I made it so I can always hit the stop button. I can grab this and drag it down here on top of the folder I wanted or just below it. And then I could collapse the default actions. And I, as long as I have that action selected here, I can then hit record. So I'm adding to it. So I just accidentally didn't get it down there in my now thing. Now I'm gonna go to the filter menu. I'm gonna apply a very weird filter. It's filter distort polar coordinates. And in here, I'm gonna choose an option called polar to rectangular, which is gonna make this image look very weird. Then I'm gonna flip the image vertically. So I'm gonna choose image image, rotation, flip vertical. And then I'm gonna apply the exact same filter again, but using the opposite setting that's gonna kind of reconstruct it. And now we have quite an odd looking image. I'll hit stop. That's all I wanted my action to do because sometimes I just want a creative result and I think this could do it. So let's try it on a different image to see if it looks fun. I'm gonna end up using this image and maybe I'll first do I reflect writing down? Cool. And then I'll use our odd image maker. Whoa. It's not that you can really predict what you're gonna get, but it's just kind of fun. Let's close that up. And this one, then let's make an action that is gonna make this image feel different. What I wanna do is make it so only the areas that have really dominant color like this blue chair, the yellow one, the red one, I want those to show up as nice and colorful. Same with this area over here. But everything else, I wanna mellow out and kind of make yellowish as if it's like faded or something. Well, what we need to do is create a new action. So right now when I'm about to create my action, if I have either this folder or one of the actions contained within it active, then when I hit the plus sign, it should remember to put it in that folder. If on the other hand, I click down here. So nothing is highlighted, then it would end up in my defaults. But even if you didn't have anything selected when you hit, plus the only thing you'd have to do is remember to change this. I'm gonna put mine down and now and let's see, let's call this make mellow colors look old like vintage or I'll just say vintage, I'll click record. And what I need to do is somehow make a mask where the vivid colors in the image look black in the non vivid areas look white. So to do so I'm gonna do an adjustment layer. The kind I'm gonna use is one called selective color. So I don't think we've used that one yet. And in here, I'm gonna go to this menu and in there you'll find there are three choices which would be for areas that are not all that colorful. I'm gonna choose the choice called whites and then this slider called black. I'm gonna bring it down to say, use no black in areas that used to be white. I'm gonna go to neutrals and I'm gonna do the exact same thing. Then I'm gonna go to blacks and do the same thing. So that should make all the areas that are not all that colorful, turn close to white. Then I'm gonna go to all these different colors that are here and do the opposite. So I'll choose magenta's and I'll put the blacks all the way to the top. I'll choose blues, do the same thing. And I'm just gonna go through every single one of those colors and bring the blacks up. Got two more to go and that's great to do this in an action. So I don't have to manually do this by hand each time. Now, you gotta be careful down here. You have relative and absolute if it was on relative, we'd still end up with some colors in there. I used to absolute so that we get this true black and white kind of a look. So this is some of what I wanted right now. The mellow colors are close to white, but our colorful areas aren't quite dark enough. So I'm just gonna throw another adjustment layer on top of that. Maybe I use levels and I'm gonna pull in this left side that forces areas to black and I'm gonna pull that in until the areas that used to be colorful. I remember this used to be colorful and so do these chairs that they're getting closer to black. I can also pull in the right side to make sure the areas that are really bright are close to white, maybe like that. And then the middle slider would control the transition. So I think I'm gonna go for about like that because now I remember this used to be colorful right here and it's looking pretty darn close to black. This used to be colorful as well. And so did the chairs and they're getting close to black. Everything else was not and that's getting close to white. Well, when you work with masks, areas that are white usually are thought of as being selected and areas that are black are thought of as not being selected. And so that's why I made this. Now, what I want to do is I want to turn this into a selection and there's a way to get a selection out of whatever your picture looks like. There's actually a couple methods to do it. One of them is to go over here to the channels panel to come up here to the very top channel, which should be called R GB. Put your mouse right on top of this little preview image and hold down the command key that's control and windows. When you do, you'll see an icon that looks almost like a selection. And if you command, click on that little picture, you're gonna get a selection. The selection will be of all the areas that are white and the areas that are black will not be selected. If it's a shade of gray, it'll be partially selected, then we can go back to our layers and I don't need these two layers anymore. So there's a bunch of different ways you can delete a layer. I could click on this layer and drag it down the trash can. The problem with that is if I do it might in the action record its name. And what if the document that somebody applies this to already has an adjustment layer contained within it and it's called levels one. Then when I apply an action that ends up adding a levels adjustment, that layer wouldn't be called levels one, it'd be called levels two. And so I would rather not do something that would record the name of that layer. So what I'm gonna do is go to the layer menu there, you're gonna find delete layer. And if you do, it's not going to record the name of the layer instead, it should record it as just delete current layer. And therefore it doesn't matter what it's named. And when the action gets applied, it doesn't matter if, when it creates layers, they happen to not match what I currently have. I'm gonna also delete the layer that I have now. So I'm actually deleting two layers and now we're back to the original image. And at this point, I want to apply an adjustment, I'll come down here to my adjustment layer icon and I'm gonna choose vibrance and I'm gonna take this slider called saturation and I'm just gonna turn it down. What that's gonna do is take the areas that are mellowly colored and make them. So they're black and white or close to. It depends how far down you move that. Then I'm gonna make one more adjustment in this adjustment. I want to use the same mask. So one way of doing that is just to go to the select menu and choose reselect that should get back the last selection I had. Then we'll come down here in the adjustment I want to use this time is called photo filter. Photo filter is just gonna add a color to your image. And right here it says warming filter that's fine. And I'm just gonna bring the density up. So you start to see it, you start to see a hint of that color in the image and that's what I'm gonna use. And so at this point, we could be done with our action. So I'm gonna hit the stop button and let's test it. I'll just go over here and choose revert and then I'm going to click on the name of our action and I'll hit play to see if it works. It sure looks like it. And if you want to see before and after I'm just gonna go to the eyeball at the bottom, hold on the option key and click. That's the original image and we just hit the other layers. So if I option click again, you're gonna see how it's mellowing out the mellow colors and it's also making them yellowish. That's just an effect I wanted. So let's close that one up and let's make another. We can use the same image. I'll just revert it. So we're back to normal in this time. What I'd like to do is make it so areas that are far away appear hazy. And so to do that, let's make an action and I'm just gonna call it distant haze, make sure it's in the now folder, hit record and here's how I'm gonna go about it. I'm gonna go to the filter menu. I'm gonna choose neural filters and in this list of neural filters is one that's called depth blur and that's designed to blur things that are far away. So I'll turn that on, but I'm gonna ignore all the settings that are in here. And I'm just gonna scroll to the bottom where I'm gonna find a choice called output depth map. Only when I turn that on, look at the image. And what it just made is a grayscale image where it analyzed the picture and it guestimate at what it thinks is the furthest area away and it made it white, then it made it darker and darker as it thought things were closer and closer to the camera. Well, that we're gonna use as our mask. So I'm gonna click. OK? And what I want to do is I want to copy that so we can later on put it somewhere else. So I'm gonna come up here to the select menu and I'm gonna select all then edit copy and now that it's copied, I don't need that layer anymore. So I can choose layer, delete layer. That means delete the current one doesn't matter what it's called, just throw it away. I don't need this selection anymore. So I can deselect and now we're gonna add haze to this image, but I want to do it in a way that's not permanent and where I can change the settings later. So to accomplish that, I'll go to the layer menu, I'm gonna choose smart objects and I'll convert this into a smart object then to add haze to it, I'll choose filter down here, camera raw filter. And in here under this choice called effects, you're gonna find something called de haze. De haze is designed for reducing haze, but that's only when you turn it up, they allowed you to set it to a negative setting. And if you do it's gonna add haze to your image, it's just gonna add it to the entire of the image. And later on, we're gonna use that mask to limit where this happens. So I'll bring that down, but that doesn't look hazy enough to me, especially when I look at that far area. So I'm also gonna take clarity and bring it down a bit to soften that I might bring a texture down just a little bit as well. That should soften it up a good amount. Then I'll come over here to color and I'm gonna make it. So it's less colorful there because as things get far away, you wouldn't notice all the colors and usually haze has a little hint of color, it like bluish. So I'm gonna move this temperature slider a little bit just a little towards blue. Now, that's feeling really hazy. So that's the effects I'm gonna apply. I'm gonna click. OK? And since I was working with a smart object, this shows up is what's known as a smart filter and that's where I could change its settings. If I double clicked right here, I don't need to change them though. So I'm not gonna double click there. Then right here is a mask that mask determines where these smart filters can affect the image. And I wanna paste our image that we made earlier from that neural filter into there. So to do so I'm gonna come right to here and you can only paste something into a mask if the mask is visible. Well, to make that mask visible, what you do is you hold down the option key and you click right there. So I'm gonna option click there. You see it ended up making it visible. Now, I can tell it to paste the image we had a second ago or a few minutes ago into here. And therefore areas that are white are gonna get a lot of haze, areas that are black are gonna get no haze. And so that should end up being nice. I don't want to view the mask though anymore. So I'm gonna go back to my layers panel, I'll hold down the option key once more all to windows and I'm gonna click on the mask again to make it hidden. I don't need the selection. So I'll choose deselect and now we have Hayes in the distance, but I think that haze is extending too far. It's getting too close to the camera. So let's adjust it as long as the last thing we did was click within that mask, the mask should be active and I can see it by this white border that's around it. So let's adjust it. I'll just come in here to levels and the slider in the upper left forces areas to black in a mask, black means don't apply. So as I pull this in, I should eventually notice that I'm not getting so much haze close to the camera. Then the middle slider controls the transition between whatever is black and the rest of the image. So I'm gonna move that to see what I think looks best. And I'm thinking something about like that is starting to make that distant area feel hazy. Then I'll click. OK? And in general, that's the effect. So I'm gonna hit the stop button. Let's just test it. Make sure it'll work. I'll choose revert to start over. I click on the name of the action and I'll hit play. Yeah, looked like it worked pretty good. But I'm thinking if I apply it to other images or even this image over again, I might decide that I want different settings when levels was applied. Well, if that's the case, when you look at the steps in your action, any one of these steps that actually involved a setting where something popped up and you had to type in a number or move sliders. Well, with those, you could turn on this little thing. Do you see a little square there. If you click, an icon will appear. And that means when this step comes up, ask me for settings so I could do that. So let's revert this image and see how that works. I'll just click on the name of the action. Click play. It goes through all the steps and then it pops up levels and it remembers the settings it was at and I could come in here then and fine tune this, I can bring that in to make sure the distant areas are truly hazy. Then maybe do a little bit more like that and then click OK? And we have distant haze and because we ended up using a smart filter, I can always double click right here unrelated to the action to get back into camera raw. This is the haze that's applying to the whole image. Maybe it's just a little bit too much. If so I can come in here to effects in my haze. I had negative 83. That's quite a bit. I might back off on that a little bit, maybe a little more like that, maybe back off on clarity. And I just figure out that I think I went a little too far. So I click OK to see if I like it better. And if I choose undo here was before and then I'll choose redo which is shift command Z. And there's after, let's say I'm liking that after more. Well, how can I update my action so that the next time the action applies, it isn't so heavy with that camera raw filter. Well, I could always replace the step with a new one where I'm just applying the camera raw filter. But if you click on the disclosure triangle here, it will tell you all the settings that were dialed in. And if you want to change them, all you gotta do is double click on this step. If you double click on this step, it will apply this filter over again. And the bad part about that is doesn't this look mega overdone? That's because if I click cancel, we already have one and it was applying another on top of that. So let's just take this one and turn it off, then we can double click on this because it's always gonna add that filter. So now we should be looking at one of them and I'll just back off on the setting. So it's not quite as extreme. Maybe I come back up there to color and I don't desaturate quite as much whatever it is. Just remember that I had saturation set at 19 this time. So when I click, OK, if I look at those settings, you'll see it's updated, it says saturation 19. Whereas before that was a higher setting. But now let's say that I want to have a step in here that tells the person that might apply the action tells them what to do when levels shows up. Because if I give this action to somebody else, they're gonna play it, levels will pop up and they'll have no clue what to do with it. So, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna click on the step just before levels. Then I'll go to the side menu of the actions panel and there's a choice in there called insert stop. And that's where I can type in a message. I'll just say just to give them an idea of what they're supposed to do. And then down here, there's an allow continue. That's gonna cause a button to show up when this message is on screen that if they click it, it will just continue the action. So I'm gonna click. OK? And now you can see we got an extra step in here. It says stop and let's text our action again. I'll revert, click on the name of the action and I'll hit play. There's the message that we typed in and we have a continue button. So when I hit continue, it goes on to the next step. And now I've told people what they should be doing while they're in here in levels, adjusting this and tell the haze is limited to distant areas they click. OK? And I think we're great. So let's collapse down that action. Back when we talked about advanced retouching, I used a technique known as frequency separation in order to take an image like this one and separate it into two parts, one part that had the fine detail and the other part that had the overall color in shading. Well, it's best to do that using an action. So why don't we create one here? I'll hit the plus sign and I'm just gonna call this frequency separation because that's generically what that technique is known as we'll put it in that now folder and I'll hit record now what the steps were for that particular technique was to have a total of three versions of your picture, all of them looking identical. So what I'm gonna do right now is type command J to duplicate this layer. And that middle layer that we ended up with had a specific name to it, it was called low frequency. So I'm gonna go to the layer menu and choose rename layer and I only do that because if I double click on the layers panel, it usually records the name of the layer. And who knows if the document this will be applied to already has a layer called layer one. So when you duplicate a layer, it won't have that name. It'll be called layer two or something else. But if I choose it from this menu, it means rename the current layer regardless of what it is currently called. And then I'm just gonna call this low frequency I press return, then I'll duplicate that one as well. I'll just type command J and that one was named high frequency. So again, let's go to the layer menu. Let's choose rename layer and let's just call that high. Now, I don't mind clicking on those layers to switch between them because I don't think somebody's gonna apply this to an image that just happens to have a layer called low frequency or high frequency. Uh So therefore, I think I'm relatively safe being able to click between those if I wanted to. So I'm gonna turn off the top layer because we need to work on the one that's underneath. And I'm gonna click on the layer that's underneath. But let's just see how it's recorded in that action. When I click on the layer underneath, you notice it says select layer and it has the exact name. You gotta be careful with that because you have to make sure that it's not one of those automatically named layers where you never know if the document it's gonna be applied to would already have one of that name and it wouldn't be consistent. So there is another way of changing layers and there's also another way of moving layers. Let me show you what it is. If I'm on the layer called low frequency and I hold down the option key in a Mac, that's all to windows. And I use the bracket keys. If I use the upper bracket, it moves down the layer And if I use the not upper bracket, the left bracket, it moves up. So left bracket, right, bracket, left bracket, right bracket, but it's only gonna do it for layers that are visible. But that would be your alternative if you weren't being careful with what layers are named. Now, I didn't wanna switch back and forth between the layers. Uh So I'm gonna end up deleting those. But before I do, let me show you also how to move a layer up or down on the layer stack because sometimes you need to. So now instead of holding down the option key and using those square brackets, I'm gonna hold down the command key. If I hold down the command key and I use the right bracket, it moves up. If I use the left bracket, it moves down and it says move current layer, it doesn't have the layer's name in the actual step. So those are two tricks that I often need to use when I'm working on uh actions that can sometimes have issues. So I'm gonna hit stop here and I'm going to select all these steps where I was just trying to describe how things work. And then right here it says select layer low frequency and that's already selected. So that's the current state of my document and I'll just hit record. All right at this point, what I wanted to do to this layer is blur it. So I'll go down here to blur, choose Gaussian blur and then I need to choose a default value and this is the setting I think I used last. So we'll use that for now and I'll just click. OK. Now I know when I apply this, I'm going to want it to ask me what setting to use. So over here, I'd love to turn on that little icon. Therefore, when this gets played and it hits this step, it will always pop up Gaussian blur and allow me to choose whatever setting I want. Now, what I need to do is switch to the layer that's on top. And so I'm gonna click on its name because I named it. And therefore I know it's always gonna have that name. Therefore, I'm fine clicking on it and then I'll turn on its eyeball to make it visible. Now, what I need to do is go up to the image menu and there was a choice in there called apply image. And in apply image, what I needed to do is here to ask which layer would I like to compare this layer to? And I need to set it to the one called low frequency. That's the one we blurred. Then down here, it's remembering the settings that I used when we did that technique. Usually this would be set to normal if you hadn't messed with it before. So I just double check it sets a subtract and then the values we ended up using were two and and now I'll click. OK. Then there was one final step that finally combined this layer that has the fine detail with the layer that's underneath, that just has the color and overall kind of tonality of the image. And that was to change the blending mode in here to a choice that's called linear light. And when you do now we're done with kind of setting up frequency separation. The only other thing I might consider doing is renaming the bottommost layer to call it original. But I don't even think I did that in my um action that I have. And that's just an optional thing you could do because the background layer or whatever is down there is not necessary. It's really these two layers that make frequency separation work, that's where they're separated, but it's nice having it at the bottom. So let's hit stop. Now, the only thing else I'd want to do here I think is to give somebody instructions of what to do when Gaussian blur comes up. So I'll click on the step right before that. I'll go to the side menu and I'm gonna say, insert stop and I'll say, and I don't know if it's actually called a mount. I think it might be called radius. So when I'm in there, uh and I wanna allow continue. If you don't have this on there, then the only button they're gonna have, I think is called stop. And the reason you'd want that in there is if you need to tell them to do something, like go open a picture that you want to use for something or make a selection of a particular area or something like that, then you don't allow them to continue and they'll have to stop. And if that's the case after you tell them what to do and they perform, it, just tell them to click the play button again and that's what would continue the action. But anyway, I think that'll be fine. I'll click. OK? Now let's test it. I'll come over here and revert. I will click on the name of the action. Hit play and OK, click, continue, then adjust the radius setting. OK? I hit continue. Let's just double check that it's called radius. And yeah, it is. So I would then find that lowest setting and click. OK? Cool. We got that one. Now there is another way to do frequency separation and that is instead of using Gaussian blur to get the detail to go away. There's a different filter you could use. It's called median. So I'm gonna make a separate version of this first. I'll rename this one and I'll say frequency separation with blur and then I'm gonna duplicate this. So I'll go up here to the side menu, choose duplicate and let's collapse down the one we just finished in this one. I'm gonna name with, with median and I'm gonna come down here to the step just before Gaussian blur and I'm gonna end up hitting record, but I might as well hit record while I have a normal image just so I can see what it looks like because it's not gonna do all the other steps before that. So I'm gonna hit record and now I'll just choose filter noise. That's where you find median. And in here it's called radius again. Good. So our, our uh little dialogue that we gave instructions with should still apply and you can still bring it up and tell the fine details disappear and you can still click. OK? And the only thing is here, we just recorded one step. It's not playing the action at the moment. So you're not gonna see the end result, I'll hit stop and then I'm gonna make sure that we have that little icon turned on that asks for settings and we throw away the old one, the one that was called Gaussian blur. So we just replaced it with that step called median. Now let's collapse that down and let's test it, revert uh click on that hit play. OK? Because that's our little instructions brings this up. Click. OK? And the image looks normal. We got our high frequency and our low frequency. The only difference is how we made that low frequency or that fine detail disappear. We used a different filter cool got them both. Now, let's say I wanna share these actions with a friend or I want to get them from my home computer onto my work computer. Well, then what I need to do is click on the folder that contains those actions and I go to the upper right to that menu. And in there is a choice called save actions. I choose that and then I decide where to put them. There is a folder called actions and you could put it in there. Uh or you could put this somewhere else like your desktop. I'm gonna put this on my desktop and I'm just gonna call it Ben uh seminar actions or I go, I should call it boot camp actions and I'll hit save. Now, I have just saved something that has all those actions in there. And then just to show you if I was on a different machine, then this folder wouldn't be there. So I'm gonna drag that folder to the trash. You wouldn't have to because you just need to do this on a different machine. Now you switch over to a different machine, you copy that file that's on your desktop and you go to the side menu that's here and you choose load actions and there's that file and I choose open. Now I just got them in there. That's how you load actions. You could also just double click on that file that's sitting on your desktop and it should make Photoshop come to the front and load the actions. But if you did, the actions panel is not gonna pop open for you. It's not gonna tell you that they load it. So, so many people try that and they do it over and over and over again and they end up with like six copies in here because they didn't realize that it's not gonna tell you that it was successful. You actually have to go look in the actions panel. Then one last thing you'll notice in my actions list. Do you see some of these little check boxes that are here are red. What that means is there are some of these that don't have all the steps being used here. I have an action called fix shiny skin. And if I expand it to see all the steps, you'll notice that over here these little check boxes, some of those are turned off here. You see those and that just is your indication that not all the steps in this action are actually being applied. So when might you want to do that? Well, let's go into our actions and we have those frequency separation ones. Let's say I use them every single day. Well, if I use them every single day, do I really need that? Stop? That gives me instructions showing up. We'll just turn off the check box there and it will skip right over that and send you right into medium. And I might want to do the same thing for the one that uses blur, just turn off the check box next to stop. Or it could be that one of the other steps in here, you could use two different versions. Like maybe I don't want two different actions for this. So what I could do is have the Gaussian blur step in here and also have the median step as well And then just switch which of the two check boxes is actually turned on. And that would change the way my frequency separation action works. Well, I hope that's enough to get you started with the actions and get you playing around with it. There's a lot more to learn about actions, but there's something that they're kind of finicky. And so sometimes you're gonna try to do something when you're recording an action and if you watch the list of steps, you're gonna notice that certain things simply are ignored. And when that's the case, you're gonna have to think about is whatever it is you were doing that wasn't recorded in your action. Is there any other way to accomplish the exact same thing? And if so then you're gonna wanna try that other way and see if it's recorded in the step as you progress. You might find that you need to apply an action to a large number of images that can be done. There's something known as batch processing it can be done starting using Adobe Bridge. Do you remember that menu? I think it might have been called tools and then Photoshop Well, you might find a choice in there that would allow you to apply an action to a large number of images through batch processing. So there's always more to learn about actions and you really need to experiment with them because they are rather finicky. Try not to. Uh well, for instance, if you choose undo when you're trying to record an action, it just doesn't record it and therefore whatever it is, you undid on your image, it undid. But in the action, the step is still there. And so that's why you gotta watch it while it's recording. And if you see that it doesn't put in a step, you can try a different way. And if you see that you chose undo and it didn't remove a step, just hit the stop button, drag that step to the trash and then hit record again so that you can continue on without having that step in there. So hopefully this is enough to get you going.