One-Step Actions

When I demonstrate actions to newbies, one of my greatest fears is that they will get the impression that actions are meant only for applying lots of steps to hundreds of images. Although that’s one of the uses, you could just as easily make actions that have only one step. This could be something as simple as an action to add a drop shadow layer style. You may be thinking, “But Dave, in your first book in this series you talked about making presets—couldn’t I just do that?” And the answer is, “Yes, you could—and, yes, you should also read that book if you haven’t yet.” However, there are two good reasons for making a series of one-step actions:

1. You can apply them easily using Button Mode.

2. You can record an action that plays multiple one-step actions.

We’ll talk about both of those scenarios in a moment, but first let’s talk about the thought process behind this idea. Think about simple things you do most often in Photoshop that are hidden several menus down. Take the Rotate 10 Degrees Counterclockwise command, for example. To access this, you must select Edit > Free Transform or press Command-T (Mac) or Ctrl-T (Windows), enter –10 into the Rotation field, and press Enter/Return. If you record that operation as an action, however, it takes only one step. And while you’re at it, why not record actions that rotate 10 degrees clockwise, scale 10% smaller, flip horizontal, and flip vertical at the same time?

Once you have a short list of one-click actions, you can be super-efficient when running them by using Button Mode. Simply choose Button Mode from the Actions panel menu and all your actions become clickable buttons (Figure 6.6). So if you want to rotate a layer, for example, you can repeatedly click the button for your Rotate 10 Degrees Counterclockwise action, and each time the layer would rotate.

Figure 6.6 The Actions panel menu in Button Mode.

The other option is to record a new action that plays a series of your one-step actions. Perhaps you want to run an operation that scales 20% smaller, rotates 30 degrees, and adds a drop shadow. To do that, you would record an action that looks like Figure 6.7.

Figure 6.7 Scaling, rotating, and adding a drop shadow.

This is simply a matter of creating a new action and recording as you play each action. Notice how—once again—actions are very specific. In this case, each step says Play Action, Scale 10% Smaller, or set One Step. That means that once you record an action like this, you can’t move, delete, or rename any of your one-step actions or it will not work.