If you’ve ever caught yourself performing the same task over and over again in Photoshop, you’d be wise to learn about actions. Photoshop allows you to record a series of commands and play them back on a single image or a batch of images at a time. Just think of what you could be doing instead of resizing each image for web individually!

Today’s example shows how to make actions work for a photographer’s portfolio so we’ll expand the background, add a drop shadow and add text. The key to a good action is knowing how to make the commands friendly to the majority of files. Reducing files to a specific pixel dimension might work better than reducing to 72 ppi. You’ll want to think ahead to make each action the most productive.

Open an image in Photoshop and go to Window > Actions

TIP: If you want to batch process your vacation photos later, make sure the image size is consistent throughout all the files. Photoshop executes some commands based upon x/y coordinates in the file.

2- Create a new action and give it a name. Once you click ok, the action begins and anything command performed will be recorded. (You’ll notice the record button is now red.)

3- Double click on the background layer to turn it into layer 0.

4- Cmd/Ctrl click on the new layer icon at the bottom of the layers palette to place a new layer (layer 1)  beneath the current layer.

5- Go to Image > Canvas Size and check the relative button to add extra canvas around the image. Click OK. For this example two inches worked,  but your file may be different.

6- Go back to Image > Canvas Size and keep the relative button checked, but move the anchor to the top middle. Click OK. This will add canvas to the bottom of the page only. I added one and a half inches to accommodate my text.

7-  Set your foreground and background colors to default by pressing the letter D. Go to layer 1 and with that selected press cmd/ctrl delete to fill with white (the background color).

8- Enter your text below the photograph.

9- Go to your layers palette and add a drop shadow.

10- Now here I would recommend going to File > Save As because we can modify this command within Bridge later. Close the file and press the stop button.

11- This is what the example image looks like after all the commands.

Now the fun doesn’t stop here. If you have Adobe Bridge you can easily batch process entire folders or certain images.

12- Go to Adobe Bridge and find the images you’d like to process. If a folder is open, but no images are selected Adobe will process the entire folder. Go to the Tools Menu > Photoshop > Batch. You’ll find the action just created in the drop down menu.

13- You can press ok to batch the images or you can override the “save as” command to change the destination folder of your saved images.

Now just sit back and watch Photoshop work for you.