2.5 Some Handy Photoshop Actions

Hey, welcome back. Now, over the years, I learned to work pretty fast in Photoshop. But, I'm using two actions that seriously speed up my workflow. If you've seen some of the tutorials I've done before, then you've seen me using those actions. So, in this lesson, I'll give you a quick introduction. And show you how to get these actions. The first one we'll toggle a layer, or a layer group. Most of the time I'm working with grids. And I have this grid layer group on the very top of my document. And without an action, if I try to align these these rectangles to my grid, I'd basically go on the Layers panel, activate it, align my my rectangles here, maybe something like this, maybe something like this. And then I would turn off the grid. And maybe after that, I realize hey, this one needs to be on the right side as well. So, go back in, activate my grid position this and go back and hide the grid. And this can be very time consuming not to mention, pretty annoying. And what I did, I used an action, and I have it right here in my Actions bar. It's called Toggle Grid, and it has the F1 key binded to it. So now whenever I hit F1, it's gonna automatically toggle this first layer group. So if it's visible it will hide it, and if it's hidden it will show it. And this way, I can activate this this grid whenever I feel the need to. So I can zoom in here, activate the grid, maybe I can do some minor adjustments, deactivate it and zoom back out. So this is very, very fast. Now the second action will do the following, it will grab the selected layer, or layer group, it will duplicate it in another document, with a transparent background. Trim it and then save for web and devices. Now I use this for whenever I slice a Photoshop design. So let's say I wanna get this this rectangle and save it, save it as an image. I would do this. Right-click, duplicate layer into a new document. And then go to Image > Trim, select Transparent Pixels, hit OK, and then I would go to File > Save for Web, select on my options, I'm gonna save it. And after I do that, I have to close this. Now, when you're doing like one or two images, that's fine. You know, it doesn't take very long. But if you have a website, a design that has loads, and loads, and loads of images that needs to be exported, well, then you're wasting a lot of time. What I do, I have my other ac, action, which is called Export Image for Web. It's on my F2 key. So I can select any of these layers, I hit F2 and it automatically grabs the image and does all of these steps that I did manually. It does it for me automatically now. So now I can just select my image, save. And once I do that the new document automatically closes as well. So, those are the two actions I'm using and I hope you find them useful. You can go to my ghost blog. It's a place where I write some quick tips and stuff. And I have this post here where I explain these actions. And at the bottom you'll find a download link. And you can get those actions and load them into Photoshop. So you can do that by opening the Actions panel. Go to Window's Actions. And then, click on this one, and you can say Load Actions. And then, go to wherever you downloaded them, and load them to Photoshop, and you're good to go, basically. Now, speaking of workflow improvement, in the next lesson, I'll talk about pre-processors.