Creating Droplets for repeating jobs can save you a lot of time, for example if you were to open 100 images and reduce their dimensions by 50%, reduce their quality by 30% and save them in GIF format. Then it would be a very boring job to do, and definetely it would take some of your valuable which you could spend on other important things. Fortunatley these kind of jobs can be transferred to Photoshop, you just have to tell it what to do and how to do it and Photoshop will complete it in no time.

In order to create our own Droplet, we need to create our own Action, that is what we want Photoshop to do for us. And then we will turn this Action to a Droplet. So this tutorial will consist of these two parts:

1. Creating your own action
2. Turning this action to a Droplet

For this tutorial we will be creating a simple action that will reduce the image dimensions by 50% and save the image in GIF format. Once you have learned how to create actions in Photoshop you can later create more complicated actions of your own.

Open the Actions Panel by going to Window > Actions ( Alt + F9 ), click on the new actions button to create a new action. Name your action as MyNewAction and press Record.

As you see below our Action has been created and it is ready to record, the red button is in the pressed state which means all the actions you do now will be recorded. Therefore you need to be careful when you are recording the actions, because any unnecessary recorded actions may spoil your images.

Now open any image in Photoshop, and go to Image > Image Size to change the image dimensions by 50%. Choose percentage from the drop down menu instead of pixels, and insert 50 in the field. Make sure the Constrain Proportions option is selected. Press OK.

 

Now let's save the image in GIF format, go to File > Save for Web and choose GIF from the drop down menu. Click on Save to save the image. Click to see the

Click on the Rectangular Shape to Stop Recording we have completed creating our Action. Let's do a recap of our steps. As you see from the actions panel under our MyNewAction we have the following steps:

1. Open - We opened the image that we want to resize
2. Image Size - We reduced the image dimensions by 50%
3. Export - Saved the image in GIF format
4. Close - Closed the image

To create a droplet from the new Action that we have created go to File > Automate > Create Droplet. Choose the destination where you want to save your Droplet. Next select your Action (MyNewAction) from the drop down menu, and click OK. Leave all the other options unchanged.

We are done with creating our Droplet, you can go and locate the Droplet from the folder/place that you have saved in. You should see a similar icon to the one below.

Applying the Droplet to the images, in other words automating our work is very easy now. Just take the whole folder that contains your images and drop on the Droplet, and see the magic happen!

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