AdobePS 7 - Tutorial: Actions - Define Brushes, Gradients, Patterns, and Screencap cropping
Defining an Action in PS7 – batch-defining brushes/gradients/patterns from Image Packs
Actions can make your life a lot easier, especially when you download a lot of Image Packs ( brushes, gradients, patterns, masks, etc ). Just what is an action? It’s a pre-defined list of steps Adobe PS7 takes each time you click that little ‘play’ button. To start this tutorial, here is a basic breakdown of what the action window does:
This might seem a little intimidating at first, but it isn’t. The only thing that should really interest you for the sake of this tutorial is the bottom bar of the action window itself:
Take a minute to familiarize yourself with its commands. The action we’re going for – batch-defining brushes, gradients and patterns from image packs – is a fairly easy one that will save you time. At the bottom of this tutorial, I will briefly go into other practical uses actions have.
Ready? Go.
1. Find the image pack you want to define. It doesn’t matter if you have brushes, patterns, or gradients. The only thing that matters is that each item is in its own file:
Open all the files in an image pack. I’ve chosen some of my own textures here. It doesn’t matter how many there are ( which doesn’t mean that you should open 5,000 images at once unless you want to kill your computer ). If you’ve downloaded a brush image pack that only contains one large file with all the brushes stamped on it, you’ll need to cut them all out so they’re in their own file. This may take a little time, but if you want to use the brushes you’ll need to do it anyway.
2. Once you’ve opened the entire image pack, choose your Move Tool:
3. Open your Actions window. If it isn’t open already, you’ll find it under Window > Actions:
4.Once the Actions window is open, click the Create New Set button:
Remember, this is a Set of actions, not an action itself. Don’t name it ‘Define Brushes’ or ‘Define Patterns’. A set contains all the actions that fall under the ‘define’ category. For this tutorial, I’ve named my new set ‘Define IP ( Image Pack )’. Click OK. Your Actions window should now have a new set somewhere, like so:
5. Before you go ahead and do the steps, read the following point carefully. Once you click on the Record button, PS7 will record everything you do. Every button you click, every tool you select and do something with, everything you do to your image, will be recorded into your new action, so you’ll need to be careful what buttons you press from now on. In order to continue, you’ll need to know how to define patterns and brushes, so if you don’t know how, read this tutorial on
defining patterns and gradients. If you do know how to define patterns and brushes, proceed.
6. Action window open? Image pack open? New set there? Read on: on the bottom toolbar of the window, click the Create New Action button. Take a minute to look at the new menu that pops up:
- 1. create new action
- 2. Name action. Choose a name that defines what this action is. I’ve chosen ‘Define Patterns’.
- 3. Function key: you can assign each action a functionkey. It’ll save you even more time because you’ll be
able to execute a function without the mouse. For this tutorial, I haven’t assigned one, but you might want to try it.
- 4. RECORD!
AFTER YOU HIT RECORD, EVERY STEP WILL BE RECORDED: HIT ONLY THE BUTTONS/USE ONLY THE TOOLS YOU NEED TO USE!
7. Hit record? Action time! Take a look at your action toolbar:
8. Define your pattern as you always would, but define only one.
- go Edit > Define Pattern
- name your pattern
- close the image file you just defined
- CLICK STOP PLAYING/RECORDING ON THE ACTIONS WINDOW!!
9. Your workspace, and most importantly, your Actions window, now should look like this:
One image file less open, you see. This is important. If you don’t close your defined pattern before you stop recording, you’ll be left with the annoying step of having to manually close that defined pattern even though you made an action.
10. That’s basically ‘it’. You have defined a new action. Try it out on the remaining image files from the image pack. If you defined a function key earlier, click to see what happens, otherwise, select your new
action by clicking on it with the mouse and then clicking play selection on the toolbar:
If you defined your action the right way, you’ll see that the next file of the image pack will ‘magically’ define itself as a pattern and then close. Click play again. And again. And... you get the idea.
Other uses of Actions
- Define patterns from image packs
- Define brushes from image packs
- Define gradients from image packs; just remember they’ll be saved under ‘patterns’ if you follow this tutorial.
- Crop screencaps/resize
A lot of people use actions to capture the steps they do on an icon: layers, gradients, filters, and so on. But that isn’t all the Actions can do for you. Defining brushes, gradients or patterns from an image pack
isn’t the only time-consuming thing we do in PS7. Ever screencapped an entire movie and ended up with something like this?
See the two black borders on the top and the bottom of the screencap? Vader doesn’t love’em, and neither do I. For one, they take up space. A lot. I screencap to bitmap for quality, and end up with 500+ MB worth of caps ever so often. If I crop the screencap to get rid of the black borders, I can get rid of up to 200MB of excess ‘black’ no one needs. The point? Try cropping 300 screencaps by hand and see when you’ll crawl up the walls and through the light fixture. Or try to resize a large number of images at once – for example, photos from a digital camera.
You can define an action for all of this. The steps are always the same – want to resize something? Make a new set, call it ‘Resize’, open up all your screencaps, create a new action, call it ‘Crop Star Wars screencaps’ ( for example ), start recording, and then simply crop the first screencap to the size you desire. Save your cropped screencap. Close your cropped screencap. And then sit back and click ‘play’ until you’ve let Adobe do all the work for you.
By the way, while you’re at the Actions window, take a look at the Default Actions. There’s a lot of nifty stuff in there, from text effects to textures!
Outside Link:Actions: automate 'Define Pattern, Define Brush, Define Gradient' and screencap cropping.
This tutorial is probably completely redundant, but I've written it nevertheless. Learn how to (ab)use the 'action' command in PS7 to your advantage, save time, automate boring tasks, and discover what's tucked away in all those actions.