Photoshop Actions

Actions are a cool thing in Photoshop that allow you to automate certain repetitive functions. For instance, creating the Orton Effect requires several steps: Apply Image Screen, Duplicate Layer, Gaussian Blur, Flatten. All in all, not terribly complicated, but certainly easier if you can click a single button. Or, suppose you like to make black-and-white images a certain way using the channel mixer to represent, for instance, Ilford HP5+ printed on Kodak Polycontrast II paper with a number four filter. These are the kinds of things that can be automated using actions.

I’ve created a couple of actions — the ones listed above, as a matter of fact, and I figure someone else might be able to make use of them. So, here they are:

Download Geren’s Photoshop CS2 Actions

These are known to work with Photoshop CS2 for Windows. I don’t have the facility to test anything else. They should also work in later versions (4 or 5) of Photoshop Elements.

Begin by downloading the file and saving it to C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS2\Presets\Photoshop Actions. Once finished, go to your actions pallet, click the little, tiny arrow at the upper right and select Geren’s Actions from the drop down list. The result should look something like the image on the right.

To apply one of these actions, open a file you’d like to work with, click on the desired action from the pallet, and then click the little triangular “play” button at the bottom of the pallet.

The Quick Orten action requires a little explanation in order to get it to work. Nothing major, except that this one is going to stop and ask you to adjust the level of the Gaussian blur. Use the sliders to adjust the blur until you get a fuzzy image, that’s still almost distinguishable. Then, click the okay button, and the action will complete. As an example:

This is the original image. Not the greatest in the world, but it will do for this example (it suffers from the over-polarized problem I mentioned the other day). That’s going to raise a little havoc with the results, but, we’ll get over it.

Here’s our “Quick Orton” version. This one’s a little over done, and I might “season to taste” with some levels adjustments to complete the picture, but you get the point. Basically, I’ve done, with a couple of clicks, a job that would take several steps to complete, and in a fraction of the time.

The black-and-white action, similarly, does exactly what you’d expect. In this case, it was designed to somewhat approximate a fairly normal black-and-white negative printed on a fairly contrasty grade of paper.