Step 2: Making a Photoshop action which we will apply to all of the video still images.
We will create a simple action to demonstrate the 'How to create an action" process. The true power of this tutorial is that you can use almost any Photoshop filter or command and are not limited to the simple Action we'll be creating. You can use any of the numerous Photoshop Actions available online, free or for purchase, that can manipulate an image to look the way you want. The two sample movies I've created for this tutorial use the Pencil Pixels' One-Click Actions.
These actions are made up of more complex steps than our tutorial action will contain, but they achieve the look and feel of a pencil sketch and of a piece of poster art. Most importantly, they demonstrate the real potential of this tutorial's technique.
We need to make and use a Photoshop action because, like the Batch command that we will be making later, it will allow us to duplicate a number of steps in a consistent manner without the need to sit in front of the computer and hit buttons and move sliders for hours on end.
If your Photoshop Actions palette is not open, select 'Actions' from the 'Window' dropdown menu.
You can start a new action in one of two ways.
1) At the bottom of the Actions palette, you can select the 'new action' icon or,
2) by selecting 'New Action' from the pop-out menu, which is accessible from the triangle button at the top right hand corner of the Actions palette. Name the Action anything you would like. In this example I'll use the name 'outline'.
Click the record button and you can now do a number of manipulations to the image. Photoshop will automatically record these steps exactly as performed.
To show an example of this, I'll go through the series of steps that I would want for my 'outline' action.
• From the main Photoshop menus at the top I'll select
'Image' - 'Adjustments' - 'Desaturate'.
• Next from the menu, I'll select
'Layer' - 'Duplicate Layer...'
and leave the default name that appears in the dialog box ('Background copy'). I could also have made a duplicate layer by pressing the triangle button on the top right of the 'Layers' palette and selected it from the pop-out menu.
• Now, with this new duplicate layer still selected, I'll select
'Image' - 'Adjustments' – 'Invert'
• From the Layer palette's 'Blend Mode',
(or from 'Layer' - 'Layer Style' - 'Blending options...' - 'Blend Mode')
select 'Color Dodge' from the dropdown.
• Lastly, from the Photoshop menu, select
'Filter' - 'Blur' - 'Gaussian Blur...'
and select a value of 3 or so. By looking at the image, you can adjust the amount of blur that makes the image appear like an outline.
We have to add two more steps to make the action that we've just created work with the batch command that we will be using.
• First select 'File' - 'Save As...'.
From this dialog box, select 'JPEG' from the 'Format' dropdown box.
Click the 'Save' button and move the 'Quality' slider to 12 or 'Maximum'.
• Click the 'OK' button.
Close the image window [Cmd w] on a Mac or [Ctrl w] on Windows.
A Photoshop alert box will ask to do: 'Don't Save', 'Cancel' or 'Save'.
Select the 'Don't Save' button.
You're almost finished with creating the Action. In order to end the recording of the action, select the Square icon at the bottom left of the Actions palette.
Just to check that we are on the same page so far, the image above shows approximately how the effect on the image should look, how many steps in the 'outline' action there should be and how the two layers in the 'Layers' palette should look.
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