Have you met Otto? Otto is a robot inside your Mac (OS X Tiger and above), and you may have ignored him up until now. OK, Otto’s not really a robot, but he’s the mascot for Automator—a program that (as you may have guessed) automates tasks for you. In its simple drag-and-drop interface, you can create “workflows” that run strings of common tasks in your favorite Mac software like Mail, Preview, and iTunes.

There are sample workflows built in that you can try, or just take a sec to create a new one (File > New) and drag and drop a series of commands. For example, you could get a series of images in your Finder, flip and scale them in Preview, and send them to iPhoto for import to your library. Press Run, and a few seconds later, the workflow is done.

The downside is that by default it only can create workflows for your Mac software, when the reality is that the tasks you’d want to automate most are elsewhere, like Photoshop. Enter the Photoshop Automator Action Pack, from Ben Long at Complete Digital Photography.

Last week saw the release of…version 3.5 of this powerful (and free!) set of actions. Version 3.5 contains support for Photoshop CS3 (don’t worry, CS and CS2 are still supported). By installing this action pack, 86 Photoshop actions will appear in your Automator, alongside all of the Mac default ones. The actions include nearly everything you use regularly: color profile changes, watermarks, various filters, sizing, saving as various file types, and more.

I know what your next question is because it was mine too… Can’t you already automate your usual Photoshop processes with Photoshop’s own Actions palette and batch processing? Definitely, but the big difference here is that you can build a workflow that combines Photoshop processes with other Mac processes. For example, I created one that grabs files from the Finder, applies profile and levels changes, applies a filter, saves compressed JPEGs, archives the JPEGs into a ZIP, and attaches the ZIP to a mail message.

While I played with the Photoshop Automator Action Pack, I could see a lot of uses right off the bat, especially for saving, archiving, and emailing files or burning them to a CD. Potentially a huge timesaver, but I did run into a few pitfalls. First and foremost, I couldn’t get the Save for Web action (arguably the most important one for a Web designer) to work properly. However, other users have noted this on the author’s site, so I’ll bet this fix is coming soon.

The other drawbacks have nothing to do with Ben Long’s excellent development work, rather with how Automator itself works in relation to what you’re used to in Photoshop. If you’re familiar with recording actions in Photoshop, you know that you can see the results as you work so you know your action will make your images look exactly how you intend. In Automator, there is no preview of what you’re doing, so you have to just know the steps and settings you wish to record. So in many cases, you may be better off recording an action in Photoshop, using it on your images there, then applying other workflow steps (like Finder and Mail processes) in Automator.

On the positive side, in addition to the huge array of actions provided in the Photoshop Automator Action Pack, the documentation is extensive—far more so than I’ve ever seen for free software. The author walks you through the process of creating a workflow in clear language and provides tons of tips for the workflows you may wish to create.

Depending on how tenacious you are about your current Photoshop workflow, the Photoshop Automator Action Pack may just be a nice-to-have, once-in-awhile thing, or the kind of timesaver you use every day. Either way, you can’t beat the free price tag, so it’s worth it to have on hand.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 29th, 2007 at 2:06 pm and is filed under Design, Design Careers, Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.