Reindeer Graphics™ Optipix is designed to take full advantage of the capabilities of Photoshop. Actions are one such capability. An Action is a sequence of steps that can be played back as if you had done them yourself. Many kinds of operations (other than painting, erasing, and using the lasso tool) can be recorded in an Action. Actions are grouped into "Sets" that can be saved to disk, sent to other people, and reloaded. Actions can also be assigned to function keys for easy access.
Much of the power of Photoshop comes from Actions, since they allow you to cut the amount of time it takes to do repetitive tasks. You might, for example, spend time enhancing one image from a roll of film, then record that sequence of steps as an Action that can be applied to every other image in the roll. Since Optipix allows you to record the values you've entered manually in the Action, you don't have to enter them again for each successive image.
Actions can be created quite easily by recording a series of steps. Here is a walkthrough of the procedure.
The "New Action" dialog |
The controls for starting and stopping action recording are at the bottom of the Actions palette. |
This recorded action consists of a Safe Sharpen step followed by an Edge Enhancer step. Notice that the parameters for Edge Enhancer were recorded as well. When you play the action, it will use the recorded values instead of asking you to select new values in a dialog. This will allow you find an optimum setting for a group of pictures and automatically process them. |
There are many more things you can do with Photoshop Actions than we've mentioned here. Look in the Photoshop manual for more tricks and examples.
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