A Beginner’s Guide to Actions & Droplets

Photoshop’s Actions palette lets you record, save and load sets of tasks that can be performed on your images, such as resizing, adding borders, sharpening images, etc. Anything you can do in Photoshop can be recorded into an action and then later played back on an image, so you don’t have to manually repeat (or remember!) the process.

Photoshop’s “Droplet” functionality, on the other hand, essentially takes an action and wraps it in an external application that can then be used to launch Photoshop and automatically perform certain tasks on the image or images which have been dragged onto the it (hence the term “droplet” since you literally “drop” your images onto the droplet’s program icon).

Actions and Droplets are a great way to automate common tasks, particularly if you’re working with a large amount of images and creating them is easy. Let’s start off by creating an action, and then we’ll make a droplet from that action.

First, we need a sample image that we can work on, so grab something (like the image below) and open it up in Photoshop).

Adobe Photoshop Tutorial - Creating Actions & Droplets - Fig 1

Now we’ll create an action to create thumbnail images that are 120px in width and have a simple border, just to get a feel for how actions work.

Go to the “Window” menu and make sure that “Actions” is checked. Now, with your Actions palette active, click on the “Create New Set” icon and call your new action set “Photo Actions.” For now, we’re only going to be putting one action inside of this set, but you can add more later. Action sets are basically just folders that let you organize your actions.

Adobe Photoshop Tutorial - Creating Actions & Droplets - Fig 2

Next, click the “Create New Action” button and then name your action in the dialog that appears.

Adobe Photoshop Tutorial - Creating Actions & Droplets - Fig 3

Adobe Photoshop Tutorial - Creating Actions & Droplets - Fig 4

Now just do your thing! In my case, I’m going to resize the image and add a border by going to Image - Image Size and entering a width of 120px (and leaving everything else at the default values). Then I’m going to create my border by hitting D to reset the colors to their default values, then hit Ctrl+A to select all and go to Edit - Stroke. Create a 1px inside stroke, then hit Ctrl+D to release the selection.

Adobe Photoshop Tutorial - Creating Actions & Droplets - Fig 5

Finally, to finish creating the action, hit the “Stop” button to stop recording.

Adobe Photoshop Tutorial - Creating Actions & Droplets - Fig 6

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Added Sunday, November 19th, 2006 at 5:28 pm under Tips.