Photoshop Tutorial: Action Special Secrets for Advanced Photoshop Designers

Every Photoshop designer always love to show his work , you know when you working in an image and you
like to see it in full screen, front and centered without any other Photoshop palettes beside your image, so what you
always is to use keyboard shortcuts.

How can you do it using keyboard shortcuts?, well first you hit the "F" key once to maximize your design, then the "F" key again
to go full screen, then Hit "Tap" to move every thing away, Now your image in full screen mode without any palettes, tool bar or any thing beside it .

That's good, but what if you have a client beside you, or you tired from hitting so many keys just to pop your image to full
screen mode, and you want to make it faster!! ... I have a surprise for you; you can do all these steps by hitting one key! How? We will record an action for it!!!!

Yup, you can do these using actions even it's contain a menu functions, it's not you same kind of action though, so let start the fun part...

First Step: we need to create a Work space without any palettes on it, and the reason we can't include this step into our action because we can't record a Tap key hit in our action, so we will create a workspace just once and we will not use it again cause we will record this new workspace in our action.

To do that:

1- Hit the "Tap" Key to hide all Palettes.

2- Go to Window Menu Then : Window > Workspace > Save Workspace .

3- In Save Workspace dialog box rename your new workspace : Palettes out and hit save.

4- Now hit "Tap" Key once again to return your palettes back.

Now you can see your workspace just go to Window > Workspace and you will see your new workspace saved .

Second Step: After saving workspace without palettes we'll ho ahead and start recording our special action, keep in mid this action
include some is special action steps that is almost unknown to a big number of designers, Now we will start recording our new action:

1- Go to action palette "If you don't see you action palette go to window > then select actions".

2- In action palette hit create new action bottom.

3- In new action dialog box choose your action name "Full Screen mode".

4- Make sure that in Function Key you chose a bottom from the list and you can add a shift bottom as well, in my case I chased the "F4" Key and select Shift option, So to play this action I will hit "F4+Shift", you can choose you bottom selection.

Now your action is recording your moves.

Third Step: Recording our "Full Screen Mode" Action:

Action First Step: Go to Window > Workspaces > Chose your new work space we made before ", this step is recorded so just hit tap again to return you palettes back and don't worry the action will not include the "Tap" bottom as we mentioned before.

In action palettes you can see the new step in our action.

Action Second Step: Now we need to go to full screen mode, but if we hit the "f" Key nothing will happen in our action, so what we will do now is a special step that I was talking about, this special step is to record a menu selection item in an action, and the way to do that is :

1- Go to the small arrow in actions palette and select "insert menu item" from the pop up menu .

2- Now in insert menu item dialog there is nothing to chose from, and this is the funny part, What we will do now is to :

Go to View menu > Screen Mode > Full Screen Mode " Select Full Screen mode".

3- Now you can notice that in insert menu item, the menu item selection is "Screen mode: Full Screen Mode " and this is exactly what we need to do.

4- Now hit Ok

Now we done so go ahead and hit the "Stop recording" bottom from you action palette, as you see your action now is ready and contains two steps.

All you have to do now is to test your action , just go to window > workspace > Reset Palettes Locations to return all in place, Then do the magic Press your action keys ass you saved it before, in my case will hit "F4+Shift" , A dialog box appeared just remind you how to return back from full screen mode by clicking "F", just Select Don't show again to prevent this dialog box from stopping you every time then hit full screen.

Return from full screen and do your test over and see the magic.

That's it for today, Hope you find it easy and worth it.
Until next time, have fun.