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

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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.

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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

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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

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More experimentation with faking tilt shift images.

Faking Tilt Shift Photography with a Painting

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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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