How To Save Time With Macros in Photoshop

Have you ever found yourself repeating the same task again and again in Photoshop and wished you had the programming knowledge to automate it? Then I have good news for you, Photoshop will do it for you, and there’s no need to learn any coding skills or new complicated information, if you can record a Dr Who on your Tivo, or whatever you happen to use to record Dr Who on, you can do this. This is even available to those who don’t watch Dr Who and it works in all versions of Photoshop from CS3 upwards.

This process works with any set of actions, but let’s pick something simple as an example ñ resizing an image and altering it’s colour attributes. Let’s imagine you have a large number of colour photos and from them you want to create a series of thumbnails in black and white.

First open your file, then open the Actions menu. (Window/Actions or choose the Play button on the right hand sidebar)

This will list all the current Actions saved in your version of Photoshop. It already has several useful one in there, but we’re going to concentrate on creating a bespoke one. Don’t be afraid of this menu, actions are simply a series of steps that Photoshop carries out in one go. You record what you do to one image, and then with one click you can do all the same things to another image, or a series of images.