Ready, Set, Photoshop Actions!

In Photoshop, you can record the steps it took you to do something and save it as an ACTION.

This is useful if you need to apply the same effects to a batch of images. Some things you can do with actions:
Resize or crop
Auto Color
Auto Levels
Auto Contrast
Apply various filters
Rotate
...and much more!

If you have to use an action on a lot of images (say, hundreds), you can go to File > Automate > Batch. Then you can choose to run an action on all of the images. You can make Photoshop open each image, run the action, save the image, and then open the next image, etc. I don't have much use for that, but if you are taking images to make into a time lapse, this is immensely AWESOME.

One of the graduate assignments deals with creating actions. I will talk about them here. I made two fabulous actions, one which will take perfectly good images and turn them into washed out versions with sepia overtones, and another that takes a decent image and makes it into a fake-artistic, rotated postcard! I know you are excited, so let's see what they can do!

This is a screenshot/explanation of my actions. It would be helpful to read, especially if you've never made an action before.

Washed out sepia action - for all of your washed out sepia action needs.

Because it's fun to make everything look like a badly painted postcard.

You'll notice that the image of my cat appears to have a thinker stroke than the other two images. It was still the same action, but the image was much smaller, so a 15 px stroke looks much thicker. The two insect images were probably 3-4 times larger than the cat picture, I just scaled everything down to a similar size.

Now, go out there into the world and make actions happen (preferably actions that serve a greater purpose than my own).