In this tutorial you will learn how to Use Actions and New Conditional Actions.

Actions are automated chain of commands that are executed upon your request. You can record actions of tasks that you do repeatedly to make your workflow faster. For demonstration purposes we will show you how to add a watermark to your photo. Open a photo of your choice. Go to Window - Action. Click the New Action icon. Enter an action name, select an action set, and set additional options if you desire.Once you click record, the new action will be created and the recording will start. In this video will be going through adding a text layer, repositioning it and changing its opacity to use it as a watermark. To stop recording, either click the Stop Playing/Recording button, or choose Stop Recording from the Actions panel menu, or press the Esc key. Now for every new photo you want to watermark, all you have to do is simply click the play button on the action once you have the photo open.

Conditional actions let you build actions that choose what to do based on one of several different conditions. First, you choose a condition and then, optionally specify an action that plays if the document meets the condition. Then, you optionally specify an action that plays if the document does not meet the condition. For this example, we will create a conditional action that will crop an image into a square for Instagram. If the image is square originally, then nothing will happen. To start off, you need to create two actions. One that performs the action and another one that has the conditional trigger. Create the first one that just crops the image into a square. To create the conditional trigger, create a new action, go to the Actions menu bar and click insert Conditional. Choose If Current Document is Square. Leave Then Play Action as none, meaning if the photo is already square, nothing happens. For Else Play Action, choose the Action that you created earlier.
Now click ok, and make sure the newly created action isn’t recording any more of your steps. Click RUN to test the action.

And finally, you can use actions to batch process your files. To do this make sure that all the files are in a single folder of their own. Choose File - Automate - Batch. In the Set pop-up menu, select the set that contains the action you want to apply. In the Action pop-up menu, select the action that you want to apply. In the Source pop-up menu, select Folder. Click the Choose button, navigate to the folder that you want to use, and click Choose. In the Destination area, tell Photoshop what to do with each file after the action has been applied to it. Choose one from the drop-down menu:
None: Leaves the file open on your Photoshop desktop without saving it. Save and Close: Closes the files in the same folder in which Photoshop found them. Your original file is overwritten. Folder: Saves the document in a folder. If you chose Folder in Step 8, click the Choose button and navigate to a destination folder for your files. Select the Override Action “Save As” Commands check box to ignore any Save As parameters in the action and use the filenames of the files. Specify how you want Photoshop to create the filenames for the new, processed files by selecting options from the drop-down menus. When you process large numbers of files, these naming tools can help you keep track of when and how the files were created. When you finish selecting options in the Batch dialog box, click OK to start the batch processing. This is a great way to maximize your efficiency with repetitive tasks.

What are you going to use actions automation for? Please let us know in comments.
#HowTech #Photoshop

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