Step 4: Make Snapshot

For the first step in my "Soft Glow" effect action, I'm going to tell Photoshop to take a snapshot of how the image looks just before the effect is applied. You don't necessarily have to include this as the first step in an action, but since it gives us an easy way to undo the effect if we need to, it doesn't hurt to include it. So, with Photoshop recording what I'm doing, I'm going to switch over to my History palette for a moment, which by default is sitting next to the Actions palette, and I'll click on the New Snapshot icon at the bottom of the palette:

This adds a new snapshot to the top of the History palette:

By adding this snapshot of how the image appears before the effect is applied, if I need to undo the effect after running the action on an image, I can simply switch over to the History palette and click on the snapshot.

I'll switch back over to my Actions palette now, and we can can see that the first step, Make snapshot , appears in the "Soft Glow" action. Our first step has successfully been recorded:

Step 5: Duplicate The Background Layer

Now that we've given ourselves a way to quickly undo the effect if we need to, we can begin creating it! The first thing we need to do is duplicate the Background layer. The Background layer is the layer that contains our original image, and currently, it's the only layer we have. To duplicate it, go up to the Layer menu at the top of the screen, choose New, and then choose Layer via Copy, or for a quicker way, use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+J (Win) / Command +J (Mac).

Either way tells Photoshop to create a duplicate of the Background layer for us (or at least, a duplicate of whatever layer we currently have selected, which in this case happens to be the Background layer). If we look in the Layers palette, we can see that we now have two layers. The original Background layer is on the bottom, and a copy of the Background layer, with the descriptive name "Layer 1", is sitting above it:

If we look in the Actions palette now, we can see that a second step, Layer Via Copy, has been added to our "Soft Glow" action:

Step 6: Rename The New Layer

Before we continue, let's rename this layer. I'm not a big fan of generic layer names like "Layer 1", and giving layers more meaningful names is always a good idea. To rename the layer, double-click directly on the layer's name, type in a new name, and then press Enter (Win) / Return (Mac) to accept it. In a moment, we're going to be applying Photoshop's Gaussian Blur filter to this layer, so let's name this layer "gaussian blur":

Checking our Actions palette, we can see that a third step, Set current layer, has been added to our action. The name of the step doesn't really tell us much, other than it sets the currently selected layer to something, but if we twirl open the step by clicking on the triangle to the left of its name, we can see that this step will rename the currently selected layer to "gaussian blur", which is exactly what we want:

Step 7: Change The Blend Mode Of The New Layer To "Overlay"

So far, even though we've recorded three steps already in our action, the image in the document window doesn't look any different from when we started, but that's about to change. We're going to change the blend mode of the new layer. With the "gaussian blur" layer selected, go up the Blend Mode option at the top of the Layers palette. It's the drop-down box that's currently set to "Normal". Click on the drop-down box to open it, then select the Overlay blend mode from the list:

With the blend mode of the layer set to Overlay, the image in the document window now appears with much higher contrast and the colors appear more saturated:

Let's look at our Actions palette again, where we can see that we now have a fourth step, also named Set current layer, added to our action. Let's twirl the step open to view the details, and we can see that this step will change the blend mode of the currently selected layer to Overlay:

We've successfully added our fourth step to the "Soft Glow" action. Only a couple more steps to go, and then we'll have an effect that we can instantly apply to any image in Photoshop, any time we want!

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