Using Actions to save time in Photoshop

じ☆ve冰风

I typed this up for a friend, but I figured it was worth sharing! There's a LOT of tedious, annoying, and repetitive tasks involved in the art side of game dev, but if you use Adobe Photoshop, there's a great way to do multiple things with a single keystroke! Sounds amazing? Yes, it's amazing. More importantly it saves you time. Also saves you from making tiny mistakes, which we are all prone to do when doing the same series of commands over and over again.

I use Adobe CS3, so I know this works for that. I'm sure they wouldn't have taken it out in newer versions of Adobe, but you may have to look in different places to find it - I don't know. (I'm pretty sure this was around in CS2 as well, but it's been a loooong time since I used CS2) This isn't in Sai, and I have never used GIMP so can't say whether or not it has something similar.

Mostly I use this technique if I have to resize a lot of files, but it's versatile! I've used it for putting borders on things, for converting a straight on view of a stained glass window to a rough isometric version. I've got ones set up for flipping sprites - you can record pretty much every adobe command into these things! But for the sake of this simple tutorial, I'll go over resizing an image.

--

So, you have a folder of images that you've drawn twice the size you need for your game. You want to shrink them all by 50%. But there's HUNDREDS of them and it'll take forever! Never fear; actions are here!

First, I suggest making a new folder and copying all of the files you want to shrink into that folder. We're doing this because then we can tell the program to straight up overwrite the file at the same time and we don't want to overwrite the original file. So:

1. Make a new folder; name it something like "Small"

2. COPY all the files into it.

For now, just open one of the files in adobe. Chances are, you don't have your "Actions" Window open anywhere. So next, we need to open that.





Open the action window from there.

Now for this to work it's important that you are going to be changing every file in the same way. Whether it be a consistent width/height/or % - it needs to be the same across the board. Maybe you want every file to be 500pixels wide. That's fine. Or maybe you want everything 50% of the original size. That's cool too. However if you want some images 50% smaller and some 75%, you'll have to make two separate actions for that.

For this example, we want to shrink all our files by 50%, so we'll only need to make one action.

We have our file and we know how we're going to shrink it; now we're ready to make the action. So here's how.





* If you make more then one action, make sure you set different function keys for each. (Currently, I have actions set to F2, F3, CTRL+F2, F4 they all do different things (handy things))

After step 4, you will be recording. Every command you do from this point on, adobe is going to record as part of the action. So! First, shrink your file to 50% of it's original size. (or whatever steps you want to do over and over again) Now, save the file using SAVE not using SAVE-AS. This cuts down on time; that's why it was important to make a copy of your original files. After that, close the file and stop recording.

So, recap:

1. Start Recording

2. Change file size

3. Save

4. Close file

5. Stop recording

Now you have an Action! This means, you can open a file, press the function key you assigned and adobe will do the rest of the work for you. Even saving and closing the file! Handy! life changing!

Here's what our action looks like:





With your action made, open every single file and just spend a half a minute pressing your function key for each one. Adobe will shrink it, save it, close it, and automatically make the next file the active file, so you're ready to go again.

Hopefully this all made sense!! If you have any questions, feel free to ask! This has been such a game changer for me when it comes time to save files and many other things! If there's anything you do in adobe over and over, consider saving it as an action. It's basically custom keyboard shortcuts - but they can be super elaborate!

Happy game dev, everyone! I hope at least one person finds this helpful.  



本贴来自国际rpgmaker官方论坛作者:Makio-Kuta处,因国际论坛即将永久关站,为了存档多年珍贵资料,署名转载到本论坛存档,由于官方帖子为英文原帖，需要中文翻译请点击论坛顶部切换语言为中文就可以将帖子翻译成中文浏览,方便大家随时查看,原文地址：https://forums.rpgmakerweb.com/threads/using-actions-to-save-time-in-photoshop.40335/