Thursday
Aug252011
Making Your Life Easier: Actions
Thursday, August 25, 2011 at 9:01AM And if you want the storyboarding action I mention in this video, download it here!
Thursday, August 25, 2011 at 9:01AM
May 22
Constructive Form Pt. 1.5
May 24
Fluid Linework
Copyright © 2012, Matt Kohr. All rights reserved.
Reader Comments (28)
I think a commonly used action is (flip horizontal), many digital painters use it to check that theperspctive and the composition are right.
Also the white fill action looks great, bt i cant think of the first step, how do you get the selecition, ithought using wand and nvert selection but its definetly not that. Enlighten me please :)
Will,
Good catch! The first two steps are magic wand, and invert selection. The trick, though, is where I chose to click the magic wand. I chose the top right corner -- as close to the document border as possible. This is a spot which is unlikely to have any line-art, so it selects the 'negative space' around the character.
Oh man, the best action I probably own is one I got from Erik Martin - "Pull Pencil". It yanks pencils clean off the page with no fuss and it does it cleaner and faster than I ever could. I haven't tried it yet with inks, but judging by how well it works with scanned pencil pages I imagine the results would be nothing short of terrific.
The only drawback to it is that the ground color of the document MUST be white, or as near white as possible. If you have a grey background, then it pulls up the grey as well, defeating the purpose of the action. Besides that, it works great.
@Matt,I like this action http://andantonius.deviantart.com/art/Andantonius-Pencil-Brush-105284502
I love actions, they are completely over looked and usually unloved but they certain save a ton of time! I was curious if you were going to have the storyboard action for sale or download ? I know storyboard artist would find this an incredibly useful tool
Something really useful about actions are for sprite animations... for example, you have smoke on a black BG and you record: Save as > name[#] > BMP format... this will allow you to modificate your smoke and then press the shortcut key and save it as name[#+1]
In that way you will only have to care about the art side of the image and forget about the saving process
Eric,
I forgot -- I was going to post it as part of today's video but my morning got busy. Anyway, it's linked in the post text now. Enjoy!
Another great video, thanks Matt! Actions in Photoshop are definitely underused. I didn't even learn about them until very recently. One way I like to use actions is for when I'm doing a digital studies. If you start recording, then extend the canvas to 200% width in the right direction (left arrow in the canvas size menu), then create a new layer and stop recording, you have an instant setup button for all your digital studies. I do a lot of quick line studies and use it for studying anatomy too (save your .pdf book in .jpg form, open the page you'll be drawing, run the action and you're instantly ready to draw on the new layer).
Though actions are just one way, I fully condone the core lesson Matt was teaching here: Look at your workflow, and see how you can optimize it.
I'm settling into my Cintiq's buttons becoming a natural extension of my workflow and feel I have a good 90% of my most commonly used functions within easy reach. Any task you see yourself doing repeatedly is begging for an optimization; and it pays off in spades.
Thanks for posting the action Matt ! If this isn't a reason to donate to this wonderful site I don't know what is- keep up the great work man!
Your a genius Matt.
I must say, that I never used actions at all until I stumbled across your blog earlier this year. What a game changer! I really like the color layer action. Simple but sooo helpful for a sporadic painter such as myself. Thanks a lot Matt. I learned this straight from you, I thought I'd just post to say how thankful I am!
I usually make actions that loads different brushes for me and also to extract a lineart off a document :)
helps allot :D
and how do you assign it to a keyboard shortcut ?
okay nevermind I just found it...
but is there any way to reassign it to say... another key combination at a later time ?
wow I am so full of questions today
@solomon
Speaking for PS CS5X, but select an ACTION in your ACTIONS PANEL and then click on the PANEL FLYOUT and select ACTION OPTIONS. In this window you can reassign the action to another function key.
Hey Matt, I was just introduced to your site a few days ago and I am really enjoying it. This video was like you were talking to me. I do boards also and I am a rookie when it comes to Photoshop. Would you mind explaining this acting you used to me? It would be most helpful in my process too. I have only used actions in the past to reduce colors and save.
Thank you Sir
Oops! Sorry :) next time i will read the comments. You have posted a link up top. Sorry i am such a fool.
I did some cool actions that tackle game art related problems. You can check video demos of them here:
vBee Photoshop actions 1:
http://vimeo.com/14119122
vBee Photoshop actions 2:
http://vimeo.com/15031277
vBee cycle brush presets:
http://vimeo.com/15451754
Some of them use cool little scripts like "select the color-coded layers only", or "turn all visible layers to whatever blending mode you like", so it might worth to investigate them if you are into actions.
Cheers!
ooh sounds nice martin, will give this a lil looksie :D
& thank you aaron will give it a try, i tried customizing this at office where we use cs3, it didn have much of any sort of options to customize it
but now i can XD
Thanks Matt, didnt know you could get the selection point inside the action, thats really cool!! also thanks for the download link, it will be useful :D.
@Martin Punchev
Those actions are amazing, theyre totally time savers when working with 3d models specially, thanks for posting, definetly going to my colection :D
Great tutorial Matt! Actions really makes my painting easier and faster, I have two actions that helps my workflow and that is making lines from paths and lines from the marquee tool.
I have a suggestion for a future tutorial, how about making it about the Tool preset, I have found that it really helps speed things up if you use one brush but has to change alot in opacity and colors between the two.
Great video, the storyboard one is really interesting. I use one for flipping an image, which is kind of an obvious one.
And i have one for scanning in pencil drawings, saves me about 40-45 seconds.
I use actions for different brushes - F12 for hard eraser, shift F12 for hard brush, F11 for soft eraser, shift F11 for soft brush.
Not very fancy but I hardly ever need to go into my brush palette unless I'm looking for something more specialized for the job
So the first two steps are magic wand then invert selection but how do you fill only inside of the selection?
Hey, Matt.
I just wanted to thank you. Without one of your tips this work could never be done.
http://www.gugudada.org/blog/2011/09/monstreonato-creative-process-and-illustration/
I did not find the exact post that helped me, but it was realated to Photoshop Actions.
I thought you would like to see how people uses your advices. So there is it. I hope you like it.
Cheers,
Gustavo Berocan
i havent actually used this action, cos i dont use this type of thing in my psinting but adding a "shrink selection" by a couple pixels (depending on what res the person works on) step into this action would probably clear up the stay white bits out of the lines... anyway, just thought it would be usefull to the guys who would use it.
I've been struggling with a particular workflow issue I was hoping an action could resolve.
Brush Rotation. I want to record an action that will let me rotate my brush 45 degrees clockwise. I've tried recording the process, but it requires menu interactions I'm not sure are being recorded. I haven't been able to get CS5 to track either a manual 45 degree input in the Brush Palette or using the mouse to rotate the angle wheel.
Searching online hasn't turned up many results, and other workarounds i've considered seem counter-productive.
Some advice would be great! And thank you for making me aware of the functionality.
Hi Matt.
Some time ago I've realized that actions are really limited in terms of what you can do. That's when I went into javascript for Photoshop. Of course scripting takes some time to get into but the result is a timesaver.
Here's an example of one of the scripts I constantly use:
http://cghub.com/scripts/view/174/
Which basically allows you to create some of the blending and adjustment layers.
I have the same scripts for brushes, for color ( http://cghub.com/scripts/view/212/ ) and many other things.
The other amazing thing you can do is custom panels where you can put the things you constantly use but not so constantly to assign them to shortcuts.
So customization in PS is much beyond the actions :>