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Using Photoshop Actions to Make a Flipbook

  • Aug 23, 2010
xtine burrough, coauthor of Digital Foundations: Intro to Media Design with the Adobe Creative Suite, interprets the Photoshop Actions panel as a metaphor for artificial intelligence, comparing Photoshop tasks that can be automated with tasks mandating human collaboration. The final result is a template for making a flipbook.
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While Adobe Photoshop offers many ways to accomplish a single task, efficient practices often include using key commands and, when appropriate, the Actions panel. You create Photoshop macros (called actions) by using the Actions panel to record a set of file manipulations on an open document. Then you can apply this set of actions to an individual file or multiple files selected in Adobe Bridge.

The Actions panel is an important tool for production artists, who often need to apply a set of commands repeatedly to a group of files. For example, suppose you saved a group of images as high-resolution TIFF files in CMYK color mode. With the help of an action, you could modify each file to low resolution for screen viewing: changing from CMYK color mode to RGB, resizing the file to a lower resolution, and saving the file in JPEG format. After recording and saving the action in one of the files, you can apply it to the group of images—while you take a coffee break, perhaps.

In this article, I'll show you how to use the Actions panel to duplicate and save copies of a single file. We'll also use Adobe Bridge to rename, view, and collect files for printing.

Photoshop Actions and Artificial Intelligence

Some aspects of image production can be automated with actions, but other commands require human decision-making. The Actions panel in Photoshop is akin to artificial intelligence (AI) in that the Photoshop user can program the application to complete a set of steps. This programming effort demonstrates the complexity of artificial intelligence—if only Photoshop were "smart" enough to edit our images without our involvement, we might be on perpetual holiday!

The following exercises show you how to use the Photoshop Actions panel in concert with Adobe Bridge. Some of the exercises demonstrate that certain tasks cannot be automated, but your final result will be a short flipbook or faux stop-motion animation. I wrote these exercises as part of a chapter for a book on digital imaging and collage using Adobe CS4. (Not surprisingly, I only needed to make minimal changes to the text to accommodate CS5.)

"Artificial" Artificial Intelligence

Although studies in artificial intelligence (AI) are constantly evolving, the history of AI also includes paranoia and hoaxes. The automated chess-playing machine known as "The Turk" was a notable AI hoax created in the 18th century. Among others, Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte played chess against The Turk, losing the game to what appeared to be a robotic chess-playing device. In reality, the game was orchestrated by a human from within the body of the table on which the game was set.

In November of 2005, Amazon.com launched the Mechanical Turk website (Mturk.com), a virtual job board that promotes "artificial artificial intelligence." Anyone can sign up as a worker or requestor, with the jobs involved belonging in the category of commands that cannot be performed by AI machines (and therefore cannot be programmed in the Photoshop Actions panel, metaphorically speaking).

The difference between the types of commands that are programmable and those that require human interaction for proper completion is complicated. Artists have created work responding to this complexity in the form of performance (see the artist Stelarc), collage (see Constructivist collages such as El Lissitzky's The Constructor), video, and more.

Aaron Koblin's works The Sheep Market (2006) and Bicycle Built for Two Thousand (2009) used the workforce available on Mturk.com to create collaborative multimedia projects. Both projects requested workers to contribute one small human action (a drawing of a sheep facing left, and a voice recording that matches a few notes, respectively), for which the contributors were paid in pennies through Amazon's interface. These small actions (drawings or voice recordings) were then compiled into a larger project that required further editing.

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