All-in-One action – speed up your recolouring process
Hi all, as always I sat on making this tutorial for ages because I’m a lazy bum. This method can be used for recolouring in any palette that has recolouring actions, so even you who don’t recolour in TWH can get some use of it!
For those new to recolouring, my super-duper detailed tutorial that covers all steps of a recolouring process is here.
Start with a folder where you’ll direct Photoshop to save all the textures it makes; mine is a folder on Desktop called WIP; make sure this folder is somewhere where you’re not going to move it, otherwise your All-in-One action will break!
Here are the contents of this folder:
As you can see, I only have some textures and a thumbnail template here, to help with recolouring and previews and such. Keep your WIP folder tidy, you don’t want to keep losing your textures once you get to the S4S importing stage!
Okay let’s go to Photoshop. I opened my tex.dds file and did the base editing (first I applied the [BASE] EA Dirty Blonde action, then a Topaz action to soften the texture a bit). As in the main recolouring tutorial, it’s VERY IMPORTANT that you create a snapshot of your document and give it a name that you are not going to be changing! I name my snapshot BASE:
Now go to your Actions palette and create a new action, by pressing the following button at the very bottom of the palette:
A dialogue window comes up prompting you to name your palette and put it in a set. Name it and click Record:
While your action is recording, it’s important that you don’t do anything in Photoshop that’s not a part of your action! It’s a bit of work but it’ll be done soon enough and you can muck about and experiment after you’ve stopped recording.
Now, while your action is recording, go to the first action of your TWH action set (Sigil) and press Play:
Wait for it to finish, and you’ll have your ready texture for the first swatch of the recoloured file. Go File -> Save As... (or just Ctrl+Shift+S):
Now save it in the WIP folder under a simple, numbered name. I use just numbers, so Sigil will be 1.dds:
Click Save, wait for it to save etc. Now, click on your BASE snapshot again to go back to the state of the texture before recolouring:
And then play your next action in the set:
You can see in the above screenshot what my ongoing All-in-One action looks like. Every action you perform, the action being recorded will “film” and you’ll be able to replay it later just by replaying the new action.
Anyway, that’s all there is to it. Just remember the mantra: PLAY -> SAVE -> BASE and repeat it 35 times. In my head, I go like: “Play action one, wait for it to finish, save as 1.dds, wait, undo to base, play action two, wait, save as 2.dds, wait, undo to base”, etc etc until you’ve exhausted the recolouring actions. Once you’re done, just press the stop button:
And your All-in-One action is done! Here’s what mine looks like, when unfolded:
And so on, and so on. Just fold it by pressing the inverted triangle next to the action name. You use it by doing your base editing, then making a snapshot (named BASE or similar, but it has to be the same every time), and then playing the action. Your textures will populate the folder within minutes. Happy (quick) recolouring :)
TIPS:
- If you mess up you can stop the action by pressing the stop button, going to the unfolded action, and just deleting the misstep by selecting it and clicking the trash bin. Then just press Record again and continue where you left off.
- Adding an accessory onto the texture is easy and you can make a separate All-in-One action for that if you’d like. Just add the following steps after playing each recolouring action: (1) press File -> Place Embedded... -> select your accessory file (mine is ALWAYS called acc.png), (2) flatten image, then save and continue with those 2 steps added to the above process after every recolour.
Good luck and feel free to ask if you need any help with any of the steps outlined in the tutorial!
