From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

784 Recording an action to play all actions

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

784 Recording an action to play all actions

- [Instructor] In this movie, we're going to take a closer look at that action that I showed you how to play in the one-minute movie, and I'm also going to show you how to create a kind of parent action, that plays a bunch of other children actions, and that way, if you edit any of the children, the parent updates automatically. All right, so here we are, looking at a portrait photo from the Dreamstime image library, about which you could learn more at dreamstime.com/deke.php. And a couple of things to note. This guy obviously has some fairly large pores in his face, but otherwise, his skin is very smooth, and that is going to give you the best results, by the way, so if your portrait does not have absolutely smooth skin, you may want to retouch the image in advance. Now, my actions depend on there being an additional layer above the portrait, and so that layer, in our case the dreamstime layer, needs to be selected for everything to work out. Next, go up to the Window menu and choose the Actions command in order to bring up the Actions panel, and you may just see this one folder, Default Actions, and nothing more, in which case, twirl it closed. We're not going to be working with those guys. And then click on the flyout menu icon, and choose Load Actions, then you'll see that I'm offering you more than one collection of actions. But the one I want you to select now is Five-step hedcut, then click the Load button in order to load a folder full of actions, as we're seeing right here. And notice, they go from part 1 down to part 5. We also have this guy, reset patterns, that's just something I created to help myself out during the development process, so you don't need to worry about it. All right, so what we're going to do is play each one of these actions independently. So I'll select part 1, and then I'll click on the Play button, and notice, at a point, you're going to be prompted to save a file, and it's this blurry file in the background. It's what's known as a displacement map. You need to keep the file the same as it is. So it needs to be called Hedcut map.psd, so you need to save it as a native PSD file. Just go ahead and click Save. If you're prompted to replace an existing one, just click Yes here, on the PC, or Replace on the Mac. All right, so that takes care of part 1. Next, I'll click on part 2, and click the Play button. This is going to go by lickety-split, because all its doing is creating a couple of tile patterns. All right, this guy, part 3, is the big one. It's actually applying those patterns and wrapping them around the contours of the guy's face, using that Hedcut map.psd file that we saved just a moment ago. Now, notice, even though we have these wonderful lines, we don't have any outlines around the details of the guy's face, which is the purpose of part 4, right here, so I'll go ahead and select it, and click the Play button, and we end up with these big, chunky lines. And this is where things are going to look a little weird if the skin has any kind of roughness, or if there are a lot of wrinkles, they're going to show up as big, thick lines, which is why I'm not using a picture of my own face. All right, now, I'll go ahead and select part 5, which infuses the image with color, and we're going to end up with this final effect here. All right, that's great, but what if you want to do everything with a single action? Then you would create a parent action, and let me show you how. I'm going to go ahead and close this file. I'm not going to save the changes. We're going to be creating it over and over again. And then, I'll click on the Hedcut folder, and I'll click on this little page icon to create a new action, and I'll go ahead and call this guy All hedcut, like so, and I'll click Record. And now, all you want to do is, once again, play these actions. And you can do that by Control-double-clicking, or Command-double-clicking, on the action name, that's another way to work. When you're prompted to save the Hedcut map.psd file, go ahead and do so, and replace the original, and you should end up with this grayscale version of the image. Next, I'll Control-double-click, or Command-double-click, on part 2. Then I'll Control- or Command-double-click on part 3, in order to play it. So notice that we're just playing each one of these actions, and things are going to be truncated if you're looking at a narrow version of the panel. But if you go ahead and expand it, you can actually see that we're playing parts one, two, and three, sequentially. That's very important. You can't play 'em out of order. Things would go absolutely kerflooey if you do. Next, I'll Control- or Command-double-click on part 4, and then I'll Control- or Command-double-click on part 5, in order to play it. All right, now, I'll just twirl close All hedcut, so that we're not seeing its contents. I'll go ahead and close this final hedcut file, click No, that's going to be Don't Save on the Mac, not to save it, because we are now going to recreate it. But actually, I've made a terrible mistake. Notice that I'm still recording, as indicated by this red circle. I should've stopped by now. So I'll just go ahead and click on this square in order to stop recording. Then I'll twirl All hedcut back open, and you'll see that I have this final option, Close, and it's probably set to, sure enough, Saving: no. And so what this would do is, every time you create your hedcut, it would go ahead and close it without saving, which rather defeats the purpose, after all. So I'll go ahead and get rid of that step by clicking on the trashcan icon, which is going to produce an alert message, or if you want to skip the alert, you Alt- or Option-click on that icon. All right, now, twirl it closed once again, and I'll go ahead and select this guy, and then I'll click the Play button. Again, I will be prompted to save this one file. That's a necessity, I'm afraid. So I'll just go ahead and save over the original, and then, notice that all these various actions are playing sequentially, and in the end, we end up with this full-color effect, which is looking absolutely great. All right, I'm going to once again close it. This time I'm not recording this action. I'll just, once again, close the file, and click No, or Don't Save on the Mac. Now, what if you want to work with a flat image file? Then we could go ahead and make some modifications here, to the children, that will be reflected by the parent. So I'll go up to the File menu, and choose the Open command, and I'll locate this guy right here, Flat image.jpg, and click Open. And so a couple of differences here. First of all, we don't have that dreamstime layer. In fact, we don't have any layers. We just have a flat background, here, inside the Layers panel, and second, the file is saved to the JPEG format, which is going to become an issue in just a moment. All right, so notice what happens if I try to play that All hedcut action again. Right away, I'm going to get this error message, saying, hey, the command Delete is not currently available. Do you want to continue? No, you don't. Any time you get an error like this, you want to stop, because it's very likely there's some big problem. And so, notice, here, in Hedcut part 1, which Photoshop has expanded automatically, there is this step, right here, called Delete current layer. You want to get rid of it, because after all, there is no dreamstime layer, which means there is no current layer to delete. And so just select that guy, and Alt- or Option-click on the trashcan icon to get rid of it, and then I'll show you that there's one more issue here. No need to sit there and play the entire thing to find out what the problem is. And so I'll just go ahead and twirl open Hedcut part 5, and then, notice right here, we've got Delete current layer once again. It's doing the same thing. It's deleting the dreamstime layer. So select that guy, and Alt- or Option-click on the trash icon, and then you can go ahead and twirl that guy closed, and you can twirl All hedcut closed, as well. Now, you're going to have to close a couple of files here. Close this guy, Faux hedcut. You do not want to save the changes. And then, actually, you want to leave this guy open. Never mind. We just wanted to close one file. And you may recall, at the outset of this movie, I told you we want to just have one image open. If I didn't say that, I meant to say that. We just want to have one image open for this action to work reliably. However, because this guy's the second image, it's not the first one I opened, everything's going to work out just fine. And so, I'll once again select All hedcut, then I'll drop down to the Play button, and click on it, and again, I'm going to be prompted to save the file. You do not want to save it to the JPEG format. It will not work. And so go ahead and switch to the native Photoshop format, that is PSD, and otherwise leave the filename alone. Click Save. Go ahead and save over the original, and then let Photoshop do its thing, and a few moments later, you should see the final version of the hedcut, and it should look just as it did before. All right, now, if you like, you can go ahead and rename this action group something like Flat hedcut, and then click on the flyout menu icon once again. Choose Save Actions, and then you would just go ahead and save over this guy, if you like, or you can save it under a different name. Absolutely does not matter. And that way, you can use your actions on a different system, or share your actions with other Photoshop users. So I'll just go ahead and click Save, and save over that original file. And that's how you create an overarching parent action that plays a bunch of children actions, and updates automatically to reflect their changes, here inside Photoshop.

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