Want to save some time so you’re not doing repetitive things in Adobe Photoshop? Look no further than the Actions palette. Let’s say you to need to adjust settings, add a filter, resize, or any of the other many options in Photoshop to a large number of photos. Instead of having to go through each photo one at a time, applying effects, resizing, or adjusting levels for example, it’s much easier to edit one photo and record the actions. Then, we can apply that action to an entire folder of images.

Preview of Final Results

Automating Actions Photoshop Tutorials

Step 1

Go ahead and get a bunch of photos and place them into a folder. Open one of the photos in Photoshop. Select one which we’ll edit and record the changes for the action. Go to Window>Actions to open the Actions palette.

Step 2

Click the Create New Action icon on the bottom of the Actions palette.

Step 3

Name is “Black and White Thumbnail” and click Record. There are some other options, such as assigning a Function Key or changing the set of actions it’s placed, but leave those for this example as we don’t want to assign a function key and want to keep it in the default actions set.

Step 4

Everything we do next will be recorded as a step in the action. While there are many ways to convert an image to black and white, such as going to Image>Adjustments>Black and White, let’s do a simple desaturation for this example. Go to Image>Adjustments>Hue/Saturation and drag the saturation to the left and click OK.