Tip From Inside ARTrepreneur That Saved me 450,000 Hours

{Embroidery Hoop Art by The Merriweather Council – the author of this post}

Recently in ARTrepreneur, April Bern posted a tutorial about how to automate a task in Photoshop by creating an action. If your eyes are already glazed over and you think I am speaking Greek, don’t fret just yet. This is so super simple, it’s actually ridiculous. Photoshop users, you will rejoice.

I had heard rumblings of these “actions” you can use in Photoshop for years and I was even in a Photoshop class once where we were taught about this but I felt it was something I’d never need to know and so I just sort of zoned out. Recently, someone else suggested I utilize this feature as well – but I didn’t get enough info from them to actually do that so again, I didn’t.

And then one magical and glorious day, I was browsing ARTrepreneur and found this little gem had been posted – it was a sign! I needed to learn this. It was time!

So what is this little bit of knowledge that is so amazing? It’s a custom preset action you create in Photoshop to do anything you want – generally, something you do over and over manually that would like to do just once and then leave the room while tiny fairies take care of everything else. For example – resizing images.

If you need an entire folder of images to be resized, you can “record” yourself resizing one image and then “play” that action on the rest of the folder – with just a couple of clicks. You tell Photoshop what to do, and it does it automatically. You don’t even need to be in the room.

If you are familiar with Photoshop you will have no problem setting this up.
First, open Photoshop and make sure your Actions window is visible. Find it under “Window” -> “Actions.”

(Now is a good time to make sure you have an image open that you can perform the action on first.)

On the bottom right hand corner of that window (the Actions window) you will see a trash can and then next to it, an icon that looks like a piece of paper with the corner flapped up. Click that.

A new box will pop up, you can now name the action you are going to perform and save it for future use. Then press “record.”

Now just start doing whatever it is you are wanting to create an action to automate. For example, resizing images. Just go ahead and resize the image you have open to whatever size you want the rest of them to be resized to as well.

When you are done performing the action, press the “stop” button – located on the bottom left corner of the Actions window, it is just a square.
Now you have created that action! And you can apply it to another image by opening it (the new image) up in Photoshop, selecting the action you just created from the menu on the Actions window and pressing play. Beyond that, you can also apply this action to an entire folder of images by going to “file” -> “automate” -> “batch” and then choosing the folder you want to apply the action to. Seriously, this saved me half a lifetime.

What will we do with all this free time?! Oh yeah, all that other stuff that needs to get done.

Go fourth and conquer.

strong>About the Author: Hello! I’m Danielle, the President, Vice President, Treasurer, Secretary, Administrative Assistant and summer intern and blog updater at The Merriweather Council. I enjoy sipping iced lattes, listening to boy band music, watching crime solving TV shows and putting things in hoops. I am often covered in little bits of thread and fabric but, well, ‘I want it that way’

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