A Beginner's Guide to Actions and Droplets

Photoshop’s Actions palette lets you record, save and load sets of tasks that can be performed on your images, such as resizing, adding borders, sharpening images, etc. Anything you can do in Photoshop can be recorded into an action and then later played back on an image, so you don’t have to manually repeat (or remember!) the process.



Photoshop’s “Droplet” functionality, on the other hand, essentially takes an action and wraps it in an external application that can then be used to launch Photoshop and automatically perform certain tasks on the image or images which have been dragged onto the it (hence the term “droplet” since you literally “drop” your images onto the droplet’s program icon).



Actions and Droplets are a great way to automate common tasks, particularly if you’re working with a large amount of images and creating them is easy. Let’s start off by creating an action, and then we’ll make a droplet from that action.



First, we need a sample image that we can work on, so grab something (like the image below) and open it up in Photoshop).