ACTION!

It's been a week of Intense Action! OK. Maybe not the kind you're thinking of. As the "technical artist" on my team, the Art Director tasked me with creating PhotoShop Actions to fully automate a bunch of tasks we currently do semi-automatically. I was reluctant to start this project because A) I know PS Actions are pretty tricky to work with B) the process is pretty complicated, involving a lot of file handling and C) I wasn't sure I could make the automated process much faster than the current process.

But, after being asked a few times "What about the Actions?", I decided I had better get on it.

Actions are really brilliant - when they're finished and working properly. Unfortunately, they're quite a slog to create. I mean, Adobe tells you they're a cinch! Hit Record, do  "stuff", hit Stop. Hit Play and PhotoShop will automatically do "stuff".

In practice, making Actions is a bit more like filming a car chase than reality TV. You don't just put a driver in a car, turn on the camera, and let the driver crash into stuff. You don't know what you'll get (plus it's dangerous -- at least PhotoShop lacks mortality). You have to say "Drive here. Hit those boxes. Turn there. Accelerate to 80. Jump over the tracks..." all at specific times. In PhotoShop, you have to plan out exactly what steps you will take - A, B, C - to get your image from start to finish, then hit Record and do exactly those steps. If you get half way and screw up, you often need to start over. Editing an action is even more tricky!

A way that it is unlike the car chase is that you're actually recording inputs rather than capturing light. Like if you only recorded the driver's steering, throttle and brake inputs. Then hitting Play makes a computer drive another car, hoping all the while that what you get in the end is what you got in practice. The car of course might react slightly differently to the computer than the human... Or you could be playing at a different time of day, when raining, with a different model of vehicle, whatever!

Another issue is that saving or loading files works very differently when done by an Action. I get the feeling that Adobe just thinks "File handling is the OS's problem". Try to load or save a file from an action and you might not like what you get! You have to carefully "future proof" your Action to avoid PhotoShop making a different file handling choice than when you were recording.

I did hammer it out in like 3 days (and I still need to teach the procedures to the other artists). Hopefully we will use these actions enough time to save more than the time it took me to make the actions in the first place. I'm actually fairly confident in that, now that I'm done. It was hit-or-miss there for a while!

And I learned a bunch more about Actions (and Batch processing). The big revelation was that you can use an Action to call a Batch process that calls another Action... That's kind of breaking the laws of physics... I didn't believe it was possible until I made it do it.