#inessencedevided

1. When you want to make a new action, you’ll first have to click Create New Action and give it a name:

There’s also a few other options on the creation pop up:

Set: actions can be sorted into folders! You can move them around afterwards just like layers and groups.

Function Key: You can assign your action it’s own keyboard shortcut, provided it doesn’t conflict with a preexisting one.

Color: idk, give it a pretty color? 😅

2. When you’re ready, hit Record:

The Record button will be red as long as you’re recording. You can stop with the Stop button at any time and resume by pressing Record.

The steps it recorded will show up under the action dropdown. You can also click each individual step’s dropdown toggle to see specific details. For example, one of the steps I recorded was to apply Smart Sharpen to a layer, and it tells you the exact settings used.

3. Recording your steps:

So for this example, I imported Video Frames to Layers, and trimmed it down to 30 frames I want to use. Here’s what I want to record for my example action:

Resize the gif to 540px in width

Apply Smart Sharpen to each layer

You can record much, much more (seriously, I’ve seen actions that took Photoshop 15+ minutes to run from start to finish) but I’m going to keep it short so this gif doesn’t run too long.

Here’s what the Layers panel and the Actions panel look like side by side while I’m recording this example action:

So as you can see, I use the shortcut Alt + ] instead of just clicking on the layer. Why? If you click on a layer, Photoshop will record the step as “select Layer 66″ (or whatever the layer happens to be named). Then if you try to use the action again on another set and you don’t have a Layer 66, the action won’t be able to proceed. When you use  Alt + ] you can see in the gif above that the step is recorded as “Select Forward Layer” instead of with a specific layer name. This was, you can reuse the Action over and over. 

Important Note:

Think of actions like instructions you’ve written for a robot. It will follow those directions to the letter and not know how to swerve around obstacles. So we gotta anticipate them.

For example: the Sharpen Frames action I have specifically applies Smart Sharpen to 30 layers. So what happens if I have less than 30 layers?

Let’s say I have 25 layers that need sharpening. You actually do not need to run the action from start to finish. You can tell it to begin playing at a specific step instead of at the very beginning:

You can also toggle specific steps on or off:

And that’s most of the basics! If you have a lot of repetitive steps in your gifmaking process, Actions are a really convenient way to save time. Hope that helps!