#inessencedevided

[sweetlittlevampire]

Happy Birthday Rima!!! I hope you had a nice day and lots of reasons to smile today! 💚🌟

Lol, do you want the honest or the polite answer?

My birthday was...well, I think the German expression "zum in die Tonne hauen" puts it quite nicely. Though it's been like that for years, if I'm completely honest, so i'm not sure why I'm even complaining.

Receiving your message did make me smile though, so thank you. ❤️

[rnmyn]

Art Raffle Prize

A relaxed and content modern Lan Wangji for @inessencedevided ☆

I had lots of fun working on this illustration ^^

[wangxiangiftexchange]

Hold hands. That’s what you’re meant to do. Keep doing that and don’t let go. - Eleventh Doctor (Doctor Who Series 7, Episode 9: “Hide”)

for @inessencedevided in the wangxian lunar new year gift exchange

[suibianjie]

I had no idea you could somehow save certain actions in ps! 😱 can you explain how you do that? 💖

Absolutely, Sophie! ❤ Always happy to talk Photoshop ♡＼(￣▽￣)／♡

Note: there are limits to what Photoshop Actions can record. It’s great for stuff like applying filters or moving layers, but can’t do stuff like replicate brush strokes or freehand selections. Also, actions will replicate your steps very precisely, so I often use shortcuts like Alt + ] or  Alt + [ (select 1 layer up/down) instead of clicking on a specific layer to make actions more reusable (more on that later).

You can open the Actions panel by going to Windows > Actions. Photoshop usually has some default actions already preloaded (I’ve never used these but they’re there lol).

(Rest of the tutorial under the cut because it’s kind of long)

1. When you want to make a new action, you’ll first have to click Create New Action and give it a name:

There’s also a few other options on the creation pop up:

Set: actions can be sorted into folders! You can move them around afterwards just like layers and groups.

Function Key: You can assign your action it’s own keyboard shortcut, provided it doesn’t conflict with a preexisting one.

Color: idk, give it a pretty color? 😅

2. When you’re ready, hit Record:

The Record button will be red as long as you’re recording. You can stop with the Stop button at any time and resume by pressing Record.

The steps it recorded will show up under the action dropdown. You can also click each individual step’s dropdown toggle to see specific details. For example, one of the steps I recorded was to apply Smart Sharpen to a layer, and it tells you the exact settings used.

3. Recording your steps:

So for this example, I imported Video Frames to Layers, and trimmed it down to 30 frames I want to use. Here’s what I want to record for my example action:

Resize the gif to 540px in width

Apply Smart Sharpen to each layer

You can record much, much more (seriously, I’ve seen actions that took Photoshop 15+ minutes to run from start to finish) but I’m going to keep it short so this gif doesn’t run too long.

Here’s what the Layers panel and the Actions panel look like side by side while I’m recording this example action:

So as you can see, I use the shortcut Alt + ] instead of just clicking on the layer. Why? If you click on a layer, Photoshop will record the step as “select Layer 66″ (or whatever the layer happens to be named). Then if you try to use the action again on another set and you don’t have a Layer 66, the action won’t be able to proceed. When you use  Alt + ] you can see in the gif above that the step is recorded as “Select Forward Layer” instead of with a specific layer name. This was, you can reuse the Action over and over. 

Important Note:

Think of actions like instructions you’ve written for a robot. It will follow those directions to the letter and not know how to swerve around obstacles. So we gotta anticipate them.

For example: the Sharpen Frames action I have specifically applies Smart Sharpen to 30 layers. So what happens if I have less than 30 layers?

Let’s say I have 25 layers that need sharpening. You actually do not need to run the action from start to finish. You can tell it to begin playing at a specific step instead of at the very beginning:

You can also toggle specific steps on or off:

And that’s most of the basics! If you have a lot of repetitive steps in your gifmaking process, Actions are a really convenient way to save time. Hope that helps!

Phlearn on YouTube also has a great tutorial about making actions [here].

[buddiesblr]

🌹 (after that queer eye extract how could I not? 😱)

so you want some more of that 👀 here you go hehe

Jiang Cheng, Design [27] Lan Zhan doesn’t speak much. Almost never, really. When we went to the home store together today he responded in one of two ways: he either nodded his head or just hummed. It’s really frustrating, how can I communicate with him when he’s so quiet? When I asked for his opinion he rarely seemed to have one, mindlessly agreeing to anything I showed him. I really hope we’re able to get him out of this sort of… self-isolation for lack of a better word and make him realize that life is so much nicer with others in it. Oh, and he needs to learn how to speak the f*** up.

for every “🌹” received in my inbox i’ll post one random sentence of a random wip i’m currently writing

[ibijau]

I'll have you know that I know think "ah yes, lan xichen" every time I see a capybara and it's entirely your fault

This makes me immensely happy! :D

[chnqin]

Friends to lovers for the trope rating meme! :)

No | rather not | I dunno | I guess | Sure | Yes | FUCK yes | Oh god you don’t even know |

The only thing better than friends to lovers is enemies to friends to lovers. I love this trope - the building of trust before the relationship, the sudden awareness of feelings changed, the potential for pining on one or both sides. It can also lead to other great tropes like fake dating or no one knows they're dating.

Thank you!

send me a trope

[i-put-the-bi-in-suibian]

There’s usually several fic ideas hopping around in my head but none of them hits me hard enough that I actually start writing it. Then BAM this one idea comes that DEMANDS to be written immediatelly and I’m helpless against it.

@inessencedevided Sophie, I think you and your 🍄 anon are gonna love this one :D