Tuesday 12 February 2013

Conditional Actions in Photoshop

Originally posted at TipSquirrel.com
Photoshop Nut : 
Richard Hales


The latest update to Photoshop (only available to Creative Cloud users, don’t blame me talk to Adobe, but I probably agree with you) included something called Conditional Actions.  Conditional Actions are a way of adding a clause to an action that will cause another action to run if the clause is applicable or another to run if it isn’t.  Clear?  No, probably not, so I’ll create a real world example to explain more clearly (hopefully).   One thing I end up doing a lot is preparing images for tutorials, this involves using the Save For Web function in Photoshop, in-putting size and quality settings, selecting a place to save the image and then close without saving.  I have two actions to do this for me, one for landscape and square images (the square action works with portrait images too), which means running a Batch command for several images would have been a fiddle and a faff. What Conditional Actions allow me to do is to create a new action that selects which of my two existing actions to run depending on whether the image is landscape or square/portrait.   To do this, open the Actions palette and create a new action (press the new icon at the bottom of the palette or use the palette's pop out menu)

  Create a New Action   

Name it as you wish but make sure that you save the action the set where the actions you are going to use are located.  Don’t worry about pressing record as you do not need to be recording to create a Conditional.   Go back to the pop out menu and click on “Insert Conditional…”   opens the Conditional Action dialogue box

Conditional Actions