The Photoshop Tip of the Week for the Clients and Friends of Ben Willmore (www.digitalmastery.com):

Since I wasn't able to get this week's tip out at its regularly scheduled time (due to an attack of the Monster Deadlines), I'm writing this while on a flight to Florida. I'm off to speak at the Palm Beach Photographic Workshops' FotoFusion conference. If you happen to be in attendance, don't be shy to come up and say hi. I'd love to hear from you.

This week, let's take a look of Photoshop's Actions palette.

The Actions palette first appeared in Photoshop 5. When you create an Action, Photoshop starts to record what you do to your image, so you can apply those same steps to other images.

Photoshop 5 comes with a bunch of extra actions that are on your hard drive but are not currently loaded into the Actions palette. To access theseactions, choose Load Actions from the Side menu of the Actions palette and then navigate to the Photoshop>Goodies>Actions folder. Adobe even included an Acrobat file in the same folder that shows you what each one of these actions will do to your image.

The Actions palette will only record things that have the potential of changing the look of your file. If you'd like to include other commands, such as zoom in, or hide rulers, then choose Add Menu Item from the side menu of the Actions palette, and choose the command you'd like to record from any of Photoshop's menus.

You can use the command I mentioned in above tip to add a keyboard command for any of Photoshop's filters. Just choose New Action from the side menu of the Actions palette and choose an F-key from the pop-up menu that shows up just below the spot where you name your action, then choose Insert Menu Item and choose the filter you want.

To quickly determine which actions have keyboard commands associated with them, choose Button Mode from the side menu of the Actions palette. The keyboard commands will be listed to the right of each action.

If you would like to include the creation of a path within an action, first create the path (before recording the action), make sure the path is active, then, while recording an action, choose Insert Path from the side menu of the Actions Palette.

If you need to apply a filter that is not available in CMYK mode, then, when recording your action, choose Conditional Mode Change from the File>Automate menu and set it up to convert the image to RGB mode, but only if it's in CMYK mode to begin with.

When you make a selection as part of an Action, the width, height and position of the selection is recorded using the same unit as your rulers (inches, picas, etc.). Before recording an action, double-click on your rulers and set the measurement system to Percent. That way your selections will be recorded based on how large they are compared to the overall document, and will therefore scale themselves up or down when applied to larger or smaller images.

After creating an action, you can Command-double click (Macintosh), or Ctrl-double-click (Windows) on one of the steps in an action to apply just that step.

To decipher what a particular action is doing (they usually go so fast, and don't update the screen), choose Playback Options from the side menu of the Actions palette and then choose Step by Step before playing the action.

Or, if you want to really pick apart an action, click on one of the folders in your actions list, hold the Option and Command keys (Macintosh), or Alt and Ctrl keys (Windows) and then choose Save Actions from the side menu of the palette. That will allow you to save all the sets of your actions as a text file that you can later open in any word processor.

After you've created the perfect action, choose File>Automate>Create Droplet (only in Photoshop 6.0) to save it as a file on your hard drive. Then you can drag any Photoshop compatible file on top of it and it will automatically be opened in Photoshop and the action will be applied!

With all this knowledge, you should be able to automate darn near your entire life, which should give you plenty of time to watch the Super Bowl with time to spare. I'll be missing it myself and spending my Super Bowl hours in coach class eating mysterious airplane food. So, let me know if there are any fun ads I missed and I'll talk to you next week.

-Ben Willmore
Founder, Digital Mastery