• Reported by Nate

WetFloor is a Photoshop "action" that will add a glossy style reflection to any image, it's modeled after the effect found in iTunes when browsing videos and also featured in the new OS X app "Front Row". The action file is available for your use and tweaking over at the twinsparc site, but I thought folks here might be interested in a little more background info.

When you're faced with some sort of routine image production work, like for instance resizing 200 thumbnail images, not much is as flexible and powerful as the Photoshop batch processing tools like actions and droplets. You can open the actions palette, open one of your 200 images, hit "record" and run through the processing, hit "stop" and you've got your action. You can apply this action to the other 199 images and let your computer take care of the job while you pour your 12th cup of coffee.

The trick to making actions is to think of your image as "untouchable", resist the urge to nudge or adjust anything in your image with hand tools - do everything through menu commands. It reminds me of my Photoshop 4 days, or whichever version I was using when starting web stuff, but before the "Save for Web" feature. Saving out GIFs was a chore, so I committed the 5 or so step process key commands to memory. In a similar way, you can save your self a lot of work in the long run by noodling out how to do all your modification tasks through menu commands only.

The menu commands captured in this WetFloor action are as follows:

• Canvas Size 200% height starting at top edge
• Set Selection select all
• Copy
• Paste duplicates image onto new layer
• Flip current layer axis vertical
• Set Selection select all
• Align current layer using bottom edges
• Set Selection select all
• Make fill layer type "gradient"
• Canvas Size 75% height starting at top edge

There's a lot you can do with actions, and all without needing to use anything more than the every day GUI interface. It's for this reason I hold out hope that one day OS X Automator can be real computer user's friend. But Photoshop actions are powerful, flexible and ready to use today.