Icon by Iconshock.

One great thing about digital media is that you can often go back when you make a mistake thanks to the famous Ctrl + Z, you can also start a work, then save the changes and continue later. Among Photoshop’s tools we can find the actions, which are commands that are designed to help you automate determined steps and execute them quickly. On this tip we will show you how to make a basic action and then automate it so it gets applied to a certain amount of files while you hang out with your friends.

1. Determine the action

We have this great robot icon and we want to turn it into grayscale and switch it CMYK color mode, the problem is that we want to do the same with more than one picture and we don’t want to repeat the same process over and over, to avoid doing that, let’s start by unlocking the actions panel.

Now that you see the actions panel and the picture open, click on the new action button and then on the blue circle (record) icon to start recording, you can give a name to your action, assign it a key and add color to identify it easily.

From this point, every thing that you do inside the Photoshop’s interface will be recorded within your action, so make sure that every step that’s being recorded it’s necessary. First of all we turned our icon to grayscale using the channel mixer panel within Image>Adjustments>Channel Mixer.

And now this action has been recorded on your action, you can notice that by looking at the panel.

Now we need to switch the color mode to CMYK, you can do that from Image>mode and click OK if any message shows up.

And that’s automatically recorded in our action.

Finally, save your file on the format that you prefer and close it.

After closing it, click on the stop button to finish recording your action.

2. Automating the action

With the action completed, we can proceed automating it to be performed to several images without having to click on the play button over and over again. Go to File>Automate>Batch.

Once you arrive to the batch panel, the first thing you need to do is choosing your action so it gets executed.

Now define the source of the pictures that are going to be edited, select folder and then look for it.

Finally we define the place where we want to storage our images and how are they going to be named, you can also leave that blank to just execute the action without saving and closing the files.

You need to define all the values so it does not show an error when we click OK, give a proper name, an extension and serial.

And now click OK, you will see how the action starts to be executed automatically.

And there you have it, know you know how to make automated actions in Photoshop, using this and you will see how your performance gets exponentially increased, you will save a lot of time doing repetitive tasks and win it on your design hours, let us know what you think about this tip and what other ways of automating tasks and saving time you’re aware of, see you on our next tip.