Barry Pavel, Graphic Designer, Web Designer, Flash Websites

You can use actions in Photoshop to automate repetitive tasks such as photo resizing, adding effects or filters. While Photoshop comes with some predetermined actions, you can create new actions by recording your steps as you work and then use them whenever you want. For this tutorial I will be creating an action to resize a photograph. We will then use this action in our next tutorial on Batch Processing.

For this tutorial, you will need a single photograph to resize. Open Photoshop and then open the photograph you want to use.

Open the Actions pallete. Click the Create New Set icon at the bottom of the pallet to create a new folder. This will help in keeping your custom actions organized. I've named my new set Tutorials.

Click the Create New Actions icon and give the action a name and click OK. From this point on you are recording your actions.

Open the Image Size window. You can find this under the Image pull down menu, or use the quick keys Option Command i (mac) or Alt Control i (pc). Enter the dimensions you want to resize your photo to. Hit OK. Stop recording your actions by clicking the record button.

Thats it. You can use the Actions recording feature for a wide variety of tasks. You might want to practice the steps a couple of times for longer tasks before you actually record them. Also, actions can be edited, so if you create a action and then decide something was not right, you can click on the specific task within the recorded action and edit it.

Next - Batch Image Processing