Photoshop Automator Action Pack 3.0 review

For the Mac-based photographer who prefers to automate the more complex aspects of their post-production workflow, Apple's Automator - included with OS X 10.

License: Freeware OS: Mac OS X File size: 0K Developer: completedigitalphotography.com Price: $0.00 Updated: 03 Aug 2006

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For the Mac-based photographer who prefers to automate the more complex aspects of their post-production workflow, Apple's Automator - included with OS X 10.4 - provides a simple-to-use, but powerful engine for building complex editing pipelines. In Automator, users create Workflows by stringing together Actions - simple modules that perform a specific task in a particular application. The Photoshop Action Pack provides 71 Automator Actions for Adobe Photoshop CS and CS2. While Photoshop includes its own Automation mechanism in the form of the Actions palette, Automator and the Photoshop Action Pack have some advantages over the internal Photoshop feature. First of all, Automator workflows can span multiple applications, meaning your automation routines aren't limited to just processing in Photoshop. Second, the Photoshop Action Pack provides a collection of filter actions that let you sort your batches of images based on different criteria. This provides a simple logic mechanism that lets you build workflows that can process different types of images in different ways.

The Photoshop Action Pack is still free, but donations are heartily accepted and cheerfully spent on indulgent frivolities.

What's New:
Version 3 includes 11 new actions including Add Empty Adjustment Layer, Add Graphic Watermark, Channel Mixer, Duplicate Current Layer, Photo Filter, Resize to File Size, Exposure, and Reduce Noise.
In addition, many new features have been added to existing actions, including:
New save options in the Render action.
Save as EPS is now provided as is Save for Web, which allows you to create optimized GIF and JPEG images.
Save for Web has been one of the most requested actions, and with version 3, it's finally here.
Many actions such as Color Balance, Hue/Saturation, and the new Channel Mixer action can now by applied as Adjustment Layers.
Many effects, including Smart Sharpen, Shadow/Highlight, Unsharp Mask, and Mono Gaussian Noise, will automatically duplicate the current layer, and apply themselves to the duplicate layer (with or without a Layer Mask) allowing you a modicum of non-destructive editing power.
Version 3 can now open any of Photoshop's supported Camera Raw formats, and will automatically use the associated Camera Raw configuration metadata for its conversions. This means that you can now configure your raw conversions using Camera Raw, and then launch the actual conversion using an Automator workflow, which might include additional processing or output steps. Finally, the update includes numerous bug fixes, most notably the ability to handle file names with international characters, (as well as some punctuation that was messing up earlier versions) and some other little issues here and there.

Requirements:
Adobe Photoshop CS
Adobe Photoshop CS2.