Photoshop (really) Quick Tip: Editing Actions

It’s Mon­day, so that mean’s that it is time for another (really) quick tip for Adobe Pho­to­shop. This week, actions!

Actions are a great way to auto­mate Pho­to­Shop. If you can mas­ter actions it will save your­self a heck of a lot of time down the road. Time bet­ter spent on more impor­tant things, like you know, web surf­ing, the seven deadly sins or try­ing to find a car­toon styled font that doesn’t look too much like comic sans.

On to the tip. When you are cre­at­ing an action, often times you will want to run a sin­gle step to test it, but if you click on the play but­ton, the action will launch, run­ning the entire action. But there is a funny lit­tle key­board trick that will play a sin­gle step at a time.

1. Sim­ply, click on the down fac­ing arrow of the action you want to test, reveal­ing the steps of the action.
2. Then  hold down the CTRL (Mac: CMD) key and dou­ble click on the step of the action you want to test. This will play only this step of the action.
3. Bonus Tip: to open a step of an action so you can change the set­tings, dou­ble click on the step and the dia­log box for that step will open so you can edit it.

Quick plug: I learned this lit­tle tip from mas­ter of all things dig­i­tal imag­ing, Deke McClel­land in his amaz­ing Pho­to­Shop CS3 One-on-One: Advanced Tech­niques course from Lynda.com.

Click on the down fac­ing arrow of the action you want to test, reveal­ing the steps of the action

Hold down the CTRL (Mac: CMD) key and dou­ble click on the step of the action you want to test.

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-10-17

• 360 vir­tual Sis­tine Chapel http://goo.gl/R3qX #
• Cool #tiki dec­o­ra­tions for haloween Tiki­Ween! | http://goo.gl/wXG0 #
• beau­ti­ful trop­i­cal col­ors: my Tahiti island beach signs | Flickr — Photo Shar­ing! http://goo.gl/nOEf #

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Design Something Every Day: Bigfoot, A Memoir

Design Some­thing Every Day 42 of 365

A lit­tle goof, an imag­ined book jacket for Bigfoot’s memoir.

Design Something Every Day: Purple Phoenix Productions

The fol­low­ing 5 logos were pro­posed ideas for a musi­cal pro­duc­tion company.

Design Something Every Day: Dr D’s Old Time Rock n’ Soul Revue

The fol­low­ing three logos were some pro­posed logo ideas for a Rock and Soul Revue that I was work­ing on.

Design Some­thing Every Day 34–35-36/365

Design Something Every Day: Lucky

Design Some­thing Every Day 34/365: Lucky

A lit­tle prac­tice with com­posit­ing using some stock images from www.photoxpress.com and a pic­ture I took of a coin oper­ated Bud­dha for­tune telling machine at the Mir­a­cle Mile Shop­ping Cen­ter in Las Vegas. Mir­a­cle Mile is a very big and very strange Mall located at the Planet Hol­ly­wood Casino com­plex. The shop­ping cen­ter rapidly, ran­domly and often dis­con­cert­ingly switches it’s theme from casino to tra­di­tional mall to Mid­dle East­ern bazaar  to kitchy Vegas trib­ute; seem­ingly the mall was built in stages or the design­ers had very shot atten­tion spans.

On another note, it was the only place I found that you can get a decent micro-brew on the strip, at the aptly named Sin City Brew­ing Com­pany. I rec­om­mend the Sin City Amber.

Design Something Every Day: Tilt Shift Disneyland

Design Some­thing Every Day 33 of 365

Another lit­tle test with tilt shift fak­ery from a pic­ture I took while rid­ing the Dumbo Ride over­look­ing Fan­ta­sy­land at Dis­ney­land a cou­ple of years ago.

I’ve learned from this exper­i­ment, that tilt shift tech­niques work much bet­ter with shots taken from a greater dis­tance than this one. The peo­ple turned out look­ing much too real instead of look­ing like mod­els. But the hyper-saturated build­ings in the back­ground turned out much better.

As is my way, here’s a video of the Dumbo Ride, mind you the ride just goes around in cir­cles so if you get motion sick­ness I’d skip it:

Design Something Every Day: Another Tilt Shift Test

Design Some­thing Every Day 32 of 365

More exper­i­men­ta­tion with fak­ing tilt shift images.

Faking Tilt Shift Photography with a Painting

Design Some­thing Every Day 31 of 365

I saw these amaz­ing images that used a faked ver­sion of tilt shift pho­tog­ra­phy on some paint­ings by Vin­cent Van Gogh. These great images were cre­ated by Math­ieu S of theswedishbed.com. I thought it was a cool idea to use a tech­nique that is typ­i­cally used on a pho­to­graph and use it on a tra­di­tional paint­ing instead. Tilt shift pho­tog­ra­phy is a style that by using a spe­cial lens, makes a pho­to­graph of  the real world look like it’s a model (see here). When it’s used on a paint­ing,  I think it looks like a pop-up book.

Above is my first attempt at this tech­nique using this paint­ing by the French Impres­sion­ist Camille Pis­sarro. I’ll post some more of my exper­i­ments, lead­ing to an actual tuto­r­ial to give my thoughts.

In the mean time these are good tuto­ri­als about how to achieve this effect. The tech­nique relys on blur­ring parts of the image and tweak­ing the sat­u­ra­tion and lev­els. My quick tip that I’d add is to  keep a non-blurred layer under­neath the blurred layer, then use a layer mask on the blurred layer to to give more con­trol over what you want the viewer to focus on, more on that later.

tiltshiftphotography.net

Visual Pho­togu­ide: how to make a fake miniature

Also here’s a cool video that com­bines tilt shift pho­tog­ra­phy and adds in stop motion for a tilt shift video of Dis­ney­world. That’s pretty cool if you ask me.

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-10-03

• Amaz­ing Retro Soviet Styled Posters — a set on Flickr http://goo.gl/NtLZ #
• “Frank Miller Makes His­tory Awe­some” by Cald­well Tan­ner on Col­lege­Hu­mor http://goo.gl/AKpr #
• A good roundup RT @TaaDaaG­ina: 20 Best Web­sites to Learn and Mas­ter CSS http://bit.ly/dqp9em via @Blue­Blots #

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