Toggling Dialog Boxes On And Off In An Action

As we've already learned from back when we were looking at Photoshop's Default Actions set, the Actions palette gives us the ability to have dialog boxes pop open for us as an action plays. This gives us a chance to customize the action on the fly each time we run it. In our case here, even though we've already seen how to edit the colors in the action and select new ones, it would be great if we could choose different colors for our Improved Photo Corners action each time we ran it, and we can certainly do that. All we need to do is toggle the dialog boxes on for our two Fill steps.

To tell Photoshop to pop open the dialog box when it reaches a certain step, simply click on the dialog box toggle icon to the left of the step. In my case, I want the Fill dialog box to appear when the action plays so I can choose a color for the background, so I'll click on the dialog box toggle icon to the left of the first Fill step:

I'll scroll down to the second Fill step and do the same thing:

Now watch what happens when I play the action. First, I'll revert my photo back to its original state by going up to the File menu and choosing Revert. Now I'll select the action in the Actions palette and click on the Play icon. Photoshop begins running through the steps in the action as usual until it reaches the first Fill step. Here, instead of automatically filling the background layer with white, it pops open the Fill dialog box for me, allowing me to either accept white as the color to use or choose a different color:

One of my favorite ways to customize effects is to sample colors directly from the image I'm working on, and I think I'll do that here. I'll sample a color from the photo to use as the background color for the frame effect. To do that, I'll choose Color from the drop-down list in the Fill dialog box:

This will bring up Photoshop's Color Picker. Rather than choosing a color from the Color Picker though, I'm going to move my mouse cursor over the image, which turns the cursor into the Eyedropper, and I'll click on the image to sample a light bluish-gray color from the bride's veil:

I'll click OK to exit out of the Color Picker, then I'll click OK to exit out of the Fill dialog box. Photoshop fills the "new background" layer with the color I've sampled from the image and then continues on its way through the steps in the action until it reaches the second Fill step. Here, it pauses and pops open the Fill dialog box once again, allowing me to either accept black as the color to use for the photo corners or choose a different color:

I'm going to sample another color directly from the image to use for the photo corners, so I'll select Color from the drop-down list in the Fill dialog box. Once again, this brings up Photoshop's Color Picker, but I'm not going to use it. Instead, I'll move my mouse cursor over the image and sample a darker gray color, also from the bride's veil:

I'll click OK to exit out of the Color Picker, then I'll click OK to exit out of the Fill dialog box. Photoshop fills the four photo corners with the dark gray I sampled from the image, then continues on through the remainder of the steps in the action until it reaches the end. Here is my new "Improved Photo Corners" result using the colors sampled directly from the photo:

I think that looks pretty good. And now that the action will allow me to choose new colors every time I run it, I can easily customize this frame effect action for any photo I use it with!

There's only one more thing we need to look at before moving on to recording our own actions, and that's how to add a step to an action. We'll do that next!

Want an easier way to learn Photoshop? Download our tutorials as ready-to-print PDFs!