76 Better Available Light Digital Photography
View and Button. List mode lets you create and edit Actions
starting with the New Action command that’s accessed from the
fl y-out menu in the upper right-hand corner of the palette. Choos-
ing “Button Mode” from the same menu activates playback or
Button Mode.
To create a New Action, click the Record button from the fl y-out
menu. The circle icon at the bottom of the Actions palette will
turn red. At that point, work through a series of manipulations
on an image or portion of an image. When you’re fi nished,
click the Stop button (the square icon) at the bottom of the
palette. Afterward, the order in which tasks are executed can
be edited by dragging-and-dropping in any order you wish.
Although Actions apply creative effects, they are not fi lters and
don’t have to be treated like plug-ins. Because the Actions palette
is scrollable, you should keep all of your favorite Actions stored
there, ready for use. The trick is not to blindly accumulate
Actions, but to explore and test to fi nd ones that fi t the way
you work. If you uncover a marginal Action, you can store it
in an “Inactive Actions” folder or dump it in the trash can or
recycling bin.
A good source for free or shareware prerecorded Actions is the
Adobe Studio Exchange (http://share.studio.adobe.com). Others
sources include ActionCentral (www.atncentral.com) and
deviantART (www.deviantart.com), which uses a uniquely visual
method of displaying their Actions. Because most Photoshop
Actions are less than 10K, you don’t have to be worried about
download time or hard-disk space.
TLR Digital Noise Reduction (http://www.thelightsrightstudio.
com/TLRDigitalNoiseReduction.htm) is a set of Photoshop
Actions for reducing noise in digital images. The Actions are
nondestructive because all of the work is done on layers. The
layers have less than 100 percent opacity, so you can adjust the
effect. The Actions work with RGB, CMYK, LAB, and gray-
scale images. They are compatible with Photoshop CS/CS2
and earlier versions of Photoshop. In Photoshop CS/CS2, the
actions are placed in a Layer Set/Group to make them easier
to manipulate.
The Actions in TLR Digital Noise Reduction use a more sophis-
ticated method of noise reduction than the well-known ways
of handling noise that involve blurring the channels in the
image or averaging pixel values. TLR starts with a mask to
preserve image details. A duplicate of the image is converted to
8-bit grayscale to speed mask generation. The mask is used
to preserve image detail. There are ten progressive levels of
digital noise reduction available, as well as a manual action
where you control the settings from mask generation to noise-