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Tutorials
Loading pre-made actions: Image effects
Oct 18th 2005
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Loading Pre-Made Actions: Image Effects:
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1.
I'm going to show you
how to turn your favorite (or least favorite) photo into something like what you see to the left
... with only one click! It doesn't get easier than this!
All our endeavors will involve the Actions Palette. If you've read the tutorial on Creating An Action, you've seen how this palette can save you a lot of time. With the palette, you can record any series of acts and replay them to repeatedly perform routine tasks with a single click. It also come with a few pre-made actions Adobe thinks you might need. But the real fun is hidden! Go to the little triangle in the upper right of the actions palette and click on it to access the command menu. Choose Load Actions....
Once you make that choice you'll have to navigate to wherever your Photoshop Application is and delve into it. Find the Goodies folder and somewhere in there, you'll find the Actions folder (inside the Adobe Photoshop Only folder). Once you're in the Actions folder double-click on Image Effects and a new set of pre-made actions will load into you're palette. You can see mine over on the left. They've got a lot of promising names, and some of them turn out to be very cool. |
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2.
I'm going to use
 first. At left you can see the unchanged photo of the two children. Once you've got an image open, just select
Keep in mind when I wrote this, I was using Photoshop 5.5. Lord only knows what you'll find in your Goodies Folder if you're using a different version. I know version 5.0 had the same stuff, and I think the actions palette has been with us since 4.0.
We're here to learn, right? Any monkey can press a button. When you run a pre-made action, check out what makes it tick. In your Actions Palette, click the little triangle next to the action's name until it points downward. To the left here you can see part of what Aged Photo is made of. Double click any individual step to play it alone. You'll be able to see that most of the actions are made of a clever combination of several Filters and image adjustments. You can see how many different commands work independently, and together. Hopefully, this can give you some ideas and soon you'll be making image effects of your own. and click the Play button  on the bottom of the Actions Palette. See what happened to my image over there.
Okay.
Well that was definitely a change. I'm not sure I would have called the action Aged Photo or not. Maybe something more like What Happens When You Visit The Tanning Bed One Too Many Times. But if I were you I think I'd experiment with a few different looking photos before I completely give up on this one. |
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3.
Here's another darling
child portrait. Let's see what
 does. Take a look.
Oh yeah. That's definitely a blizzard. I'm feeling colder already.
uses a combination of the Pointillize and Motion Blur Filters. |
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4.
Another action, another
photo to try it on.
 sounds like the child will soon be looking reptilian. What in fact it does, as you can see is put flat scales over the whole photo. I think I might next try to run this action with a selection around the face & skin of the girl in a larger resolution image (so the scales would be smaller). The whole effect would still look flat, though. Maybe if I tinted her skin green and got the scales small enough, it would look pretty good.
To the left on the bottom, I applied the action to an empty file I filled with a green of my choice. This action makes a cool 2-D texture. |
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5.
This one's
called
 . And after I open my image and hit the Play Button at the bottom of the Actions Palette, the child in the photo starts to look like Cybil Shepard's scenes in Moonlighting. |
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6.
Here's my
favorite.
 is not a film starring Burt Reynolds and Marky Mark. It's an action that gives just about any image a very interesting and enjoyable effect. It uses the Find Edges filter and the Invert command to produce the colorful outline versions of the images you see to the left.
You can have hours of fun with this one. And, once you know how to perform it yourself, what variations can you come up with? I'd try filling the black areas with some dark texture and see how that looked for starters. |
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7.
To the left here, I've taken an action called
 and applied it to the image of the boy. True to its word, the action has divided my image into four equal sections and treated each a little differently. If you like this idea, try applying different image effects actions to selected areas you draw with the rectangular marquee  in your photo. |
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8.
One more before we go.
 Had an effect I really liked. You can see from this shot of my layers palette
that it made a radial gradient layer mask, among other tricks, to make the colors less saturated the farther they are from the center of the image.
Most of the actions are very polite and create all their effects on separate layers so that your original image remains untouched. The pre-made actions are lots of fun to try. There's several more I haven't shown you. Try them out. Just try to analyze exactly what they're doing to your image, so you're learning. I just don't think you'd be able to look yourself in the mirror if you start showing your pals all the cool image effects you've created, when Photoshop's doing most of the work. Would you?
Now go load some actions! |
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Latest Forums Clone YourselfThat is quit nice. But I think that can be more easy to do.. |
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