Steps 10 - 13: Creating The Selections For The Photo Corners

As we make our way through the Photo Corners action in the Actions palette, we come to step 10, Set Selection. This step, along with the three Add To Selection steps that follow it, creates a triangular selection in one of the four corners of the photo. To save us a little time, and as an opportunity to show you a little trick for playing several actions at once, I'm going to select the first step, "Set Selection", then I'll hold down my Shift key and click on the third "Add To Selection" step (step 13), which will select all four steps at once in the Actions palette:

To tell Photoshop to play all four steps one after the other once you have them selected, simply click on the Play icon at the bottom of the Actions palette:

If we look at the image in the document window now, we can see a triangular-shaped selection in each of the four corners of the photo:

The only minor downside to playing several steps at once like this is that Photoshop doesn't automatically advance you to the next step in the action when it's done, so you'll need to click on the next step yourself to select it. Not a huge deal, but worth mentioning anyway.

Step 14: Reset Swatches

Arriving at step 14, Reset Swatches, we find another step that seems to have something to do with color in the action. This step, which again is so straightforward that no additional details are needed in the Actions palette, resets the Foreground and Background colors to their defaults, with black becoming the foreground color and white as the background color:

I'll hold down Ctrl (Win) / Command (Mac) and double-click on the step to play it, and we can see if we look at the Foreground and Background color swatches in the Tools palette that the foreground color (the left swatch) is now set to black while the background color (the right swatch) is set to white:

Your foreground and background colors may have already been set to the default colors before playing this step. In fact, we may not even need this step, so it may end up being one we can delete, or at least turn off, when we go to edit the action later.

Step 15: Fill

Step 15 in the Photo Corners action brings us to another step named Fill. If you recall, the sixth step in the action was also a Fill step, and it filled the "new background" layer with gray. Let's twirl open this step to see the details:

It looks like this time, we'll be filling those four triangular selections we just made with our current background color, which explains why we reset the foreground and background colors in the previous step. Since our background color is now set to white, the four selections will be filled with white. I'll play the step (I think we all know how to play the step at this point so I won't bother explaining how), and if we look at the image in the document window, we can see that the four selections are now filled with white, giving us the photo corners:

Okay! We've found the steps that control the colors used in the action! We now know which steps to edit. Two of the steps are named "Fill", with the first one controlling the color of the background and the second setting the color for the photo corners themselves. We also found a couple of steps that are probably not needed, with one converting our image to the RGB color mode and the other resetting our foreground and background colors. Let's quickly finish making our way through this action so we can see a few more examples of the kinds of things you can record with an action, and then we'll go about editing our own custom version!