Photoshop actions allow you to program Photoshop to do a task for you automatically, significantly shortening your editing time when working with a lot of pictures. If you always put a watermark on your photos, for example, you can "teach" Photoshop how to make your watermark and then have it placed on every picture. Creating actions is essential to becoming a productive, effective editor in Photoshop. In this tutorial, we will learn how to create a Dramatic Portrait action.
A little trick to creating an action in Photoshop, we have to be careful and try to make an "intelligent" action. This means that we have to make sure that we do not choose certain ways, for example, we try not to use words like layer 1 or layer 2 ...
It is possible that when you want to use the action on the other image, that action will not work because Photoshop cannot find the specific way(layer 1, layer 2...) I hope that this has some sense.😕😇
Step 1
Open the image you want to use for this project in Photoshop and you can use this action for all types of images, portraits, landscapes ...Go to the Window panel on a top and click on an action, it will pop up a little window, click and a CREATE NEW SET, name your set Portrait and click OK.
Step 2
In action panel, clicks on CREATE NEW ACTION, name your action, click RECORD. Now whatever you do in Photoshop will be recorded in action. If you want to delete something from the action, just highlight that and click on a delete button. Make a new layer, make the stamp of layers press and hold the SHIFT key +CTRL + ALT + E.
Step 3
Now we are adding some sharpness to the image. Go to Image - Adjustment - Desaturate, Blending mode - Overlay. For the future, if you are not sure which blending mode you want to use and you do not want all your attempts to be recorded in action. Double click on a layer, a Layer Style window will open and you can try different types of blending modes, as long as you don't press OK nothing will be recorded in action. Go to Filter - Other - High Pass set a radius around 3.2 pixels
Step 4
Next, we are adding a Gradient Map, set up on basic black and white. Pres stop playing/ recording and your action is done.
Tip 1
If you want to go from one layer to another but you don't want your steps to be recorded I have a pretty nice shortcut for that. Hold the Alt and press the bracket key [ , with this shortcut, you can move backward and you can even see in the action it says select backward layer. To move forward use the shortcut Alt + ] in action says select forward layer. If you want to train Photoshop to create a group, hold and press Alt + Shift and bracket key ] to select both layers.
Tip 2
If you want to do some changes in action like for example the radius of the high pass. Click on the little box next to high pass to bring up the dialog so we can choose if we want to leave some note for us or somebody else. Go to action dialog and choose insert stop and you can write there, for example, Choose High Pass Radius. Each time you use this action, a small window will appear with this message and you can decide which radius you want to use in each image.
Tip 3
How to save the action on your computer? Select the folder of action which you want to save go to action dialog and click on save actions.
This is how you make a Photoshop action. I hope it was not complicated. Over the years, these actions have saved me a lot of nerves and time. Thanks for reading the article I hope you liked it, and we’ll read on in the next one.😅😅
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