How to Create | Record Action in Photoshop?

It is a simple tutorial that will teach you how to create and use actions in Photoshop. If you are new to Photoshop, you may find yourself repeating the same steps over and over again, because you like the effect that certain adjustments have on your photos. Thanks to  Photoshop “actions,” which are basically just a series of steps that can be recorded, by pressing one button, and can be applied to your photo – very similar to a Light-room preset. You can easily create your own actions in Photoshop to simplify your work.

Video Walk-through

I will start opening an image in Photoshop.

Step 1: Get Action Pallete from Window Menu

Step 2: Create a Custom Action Group
Click on the folder icon, Create New Set. You will then a box box, at which point you can rename your folder if you want for easy identification, especially if you have a lot of actions stored in Photoshop.

Step 3: Create a New Action 
With your new set selected, click the Create New Action icon, circled in the figure.

Step 4: Create a duplicate layer 
To create duplicate layer, select the background layer and press Ctrl + J or right click on the background layer and click on Create duplicate layer. This action will be recorded that you can see in action pallete.

Step 5: Apply some adjustment to the layers 
The best thing you can do when you are writing actions is to work with Adjustment Layers. So, every time you want to apply an effect to your photo, select Layer, New Adjustment Layer, and then the type of adjustment you want to make. Adjust Levels Click on Image --> Adjustments --> Levels Set Levels as shown in the figure.

Apply Gaussian Blur

Set Blend mode to Soft Light

Step 6: Stop recording Action 
Go to Action Palette and click on Stop Icon as shown in the figure below;

Step 7: Open new image in Photoshop

Step 8: Apply Action to get the result 
As we have already create an Action named "gaussian_effect" in My_action_group set, we can simply play that action from action palette to apply it onto the new image.

Result:

Black and White Vignette Istagram Effect

This tutorial will show you step by step process of how to apply a black and white Vignette and Istagram effect to an image.

To download the stock that I have used in this tutorial click on this link.

Step 1:
First open up the image with photoshop.

Step 2:  Duplicate the original layer
to avoid any kind of changes to original image.


Step 3: Make some adjustments to the new layer

a) Black and White
Go to Image --> Adjustments --> Black and White
Leave the default values and click on OK.

b) Curves
Image --> Adjustments --> Curve
Set Output = 159
Input = 143

c) Levels
Image --> Adjustments --> Levels
Input levels:
4   --   0.74  --  207

RESULT of step 4

Step 4: Create duplicate layer of Action_layer as Action_layer copy

Step 5: Apply Gaussian Blur
Filter --> Blur --> Gaussian Blur
Set radius pixel to 4.6px

Step 6: Apply Layer Mask
With the Action_layer copy selected, click on add layer mask in layers palette.

Choose Gradient
Type Radial
Fore color - Black
Back color - White
Follow instruction in the given image

Then, click on the center of the image and drag it to any corner and release as shown the figure below:

After applying gradient mask we get the following result:

Step 7: Apply Vignette Effect to the Action_layer copy
Filter --> Lens Correction --> Click on Custom tab
Set Vignette amount to -100

Now its all done. Here is the final result that you will see:

Hope this tutorial was helpful for you. If you like this tutorial do not forget to hit like and share it to your friends. Thanks for reading.