Time is money and I dig using Photoshop custom actions to save time doing repetitive tasks. Actions are essentially macros.

Here’s how to make a quick Photoshop action, step by step, that will resize and save a picture. It will only prompt you to change the name or confirm the changed picture which at that time if you don’t like the changes then you can back out and manually work with the image.

Load into Photoshop any picture that needs to be resized. On the right menu choose the “Actions” tab.

Next to the trash can you’ll notice a “create a new action” button, click that and a “New Action” window will open.

Now you need to create a name for the action and optionally set a hotkey combination so you don’t even need to click with the mouse.

#1: I changed the name of the action to: “makeShrink”
#2: optional - changed so that pressing the F11 key inside of Photoshop would launch the makeShrink action.
#3: optional - you could check these boxes so that the SHIFT or CONTROL key plus the FUNCTION key would be required.
#4: optional - pick a color for the action so it is more easily found in the Actions menu.
#5: After setting the above options to start recording the makeShrink action then just press the “Record” buttong

Now everything you are doing in photoshop is being recorded so go through the following steps:

Instead of the following 12 different mouse clicks and input: (1) IMAGE -> (2) IMAGE Size -> (3) Change width to 400 with constrain properties -> (4) OK -> (5) FILE -> (6) Save for Web -> (7) Change quality slider -> (8) OK -> (9) CONFIRM -> OK

After clicking the last OK you will be back at the main Photoshop menu and you can click the black stop button (see step #2). Your action has now been created.

Next, find the action makeShrink in the default Actions menu — you’ll probably have to scroll to find it somewhere near the bottom — and then click and drag the action so it’s up at the top just below the Default Actions.atm folder in the Actions tab view.

Now whenever you want to shorten the nine steps explained above to resize a picture you can just load the image and click the “play action” in the Actions menu for makeShrink. You could make different actions for different shapes and sizes. Perhaps a makeThumb for a thumbnail sized graphic.

What cool Photoshop actions have you created?

Did this post make you go hmm?

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