How to record repetitive edits and play them back
The Actions panel in Paint by Zaweba (Alt+F9) records commands, filters and even brush strokes, then replays them on any image or a whole folder.
Record them as an action. In Paint by Zaweba, open the Actions panel with Alt+F9, start recording and do the edit once. Menu commands are kept with the values you typed into their dialogs, filters and adjustments with their settings, and brush strokes and other tool use too. Then play the action on any document, or hand it to Batch to run over a whole folder.
Any edit you do more than a few times is worth recording. Resizing photos for a website, adding a border and a watermark, converting a set of product shots to the same look: each one is a list of steps, and an action remembers the list so you don't have to.
What gets recorded
Almost everything. Menu commands are stored with their dialog values, so an Image Size step remembers the size you typed. Filters and adjustments keep their settings. Brush strokes and other tool use are recorded as well, which means even a painted vignette or a signature drawn by hand can be part of an action.
Step by step
Open a typical picture. In the Actions panel, create a new action, give it a name you'll recognise later, and start recording. Then work through the edit as normal. Each step appears in the panel as you go.
Stop recording when you're done. To test it, open another picture and play the action. It runs every step in order.
If a step is wrong, you don't need to record from scratch. You can untick steps to skip them, and play from a chosen step rather than from the start.
Making actions flexible
A few options turn a rigid recording into a useful tool. Insert Stop pauses the action at a point so you can do something by hand, such as position a crop, before carrying on. Ask When Played makes a step open its dialog during playback, so you can change the values for that picture. Insert Conditional lets an action take different paths depending on a condition, so one action can cope with more than one kind of picture.
You can give actions keyboard shortcuts, and Button Mode shows the panel as a set of buttons, which is quick when you use a handful of actions all day.
Running an action over a folder
Batch runs a saved action over a whole folder. It can also resize, pad, filter, remove backgrounds and export as part of the run, it names output files with tokens such as {date} and {ext}, and it writes a batch-log.txt so you can see what happened to each file. It can be started from the command line too, which lets you fit it into a larger routine.
Sharing and starting points
Actions save as .ptactions files, so you can keep them, back them up and share them with colleagues. Paint by Zaweba comes with bundled sets, including Image Effects, Frames, Production and Text Effects, which are good to learn from: open one and look at the steps.
Getting a good result
Record on a typical picture, not an unusual one, so the action suits most of what you'll feed it. Avoid steps that depend on one picture's content, such as a selection drawn round a particular face, unless you add a Stop there. And test the finished action on a few different pictures before running it on hundreds.
A good action pays for itself the second time you use it. In Paint by Zaweba, the Actions panel turns a repetitive afternoon into a few clicks.
