Introduction

Auto actions in clip studio is a very versatile tool that can be used automate tasks that you find yourself doing often. There are a plethora of things that can be done using auto actions. In this tutorial, I would like to show you how auto actions can be used to peek at values of your art and as well extract rulers or guides from a layer

Peek at Values

Values refer to how dark or light a tone is. Good paintings in general usually have a good value base as well. It is a good idea to regularly examine the relationship between your values while painting. A way to simplify this process is by looking at your image in greyscale. There is way to peek at the values in your image in a non-destructive manner(without having to convert your entire image into greyscale) using blending modes. With auto-actions, you can easily automate this process.

 

The steps are given below:

• Add a new auto action and call it "greyscale"

• Hit the record button

• Add a fill layer

• Set the saturation to zero because we want to convert the image to greyscale

• Change the blending mode of the fill layer to saturation

You can rename then fill layer to greyscale and we're done. This greyscale layer should always be at the top of your layer order so it can take it into account all the layers in your scene. Toggling the greyscale layer on and off can allow you to regularly peek at your values at any stage of your painting.

Extract rulers or grids from a layer

To make up a scene, we can pose 3d models however we want. This allows us to draw other objects within the same scene as the model previously posed as long as we follow the perspective grid laid out by the 3d layer.

 

You can show the rulers in the 3d layer by Layer->Ruler/frame->Show Ruler(B)

 

In certain scenarios, we would want the rulers on its own separate layer to better

organize our workflow. We can automate this process with auto-actions using the

steps below

• Add a new auto action and call it "extract rulers"

• Hit record

• Go to Layer->Convert Layer

• Make sure the Type is set to Raster Layer then it OK

• Go to Select->Select All

• Click on Delete in the selection panel on screen

• Go to Select->Deselect

We are done with our custom auto action. After we isolate the ruler from the 3d layer in our earlier example, changing the camera angle of any model invalidates the rulers we isolated because doing so changes the perspective grid of the 3d layer. The "extract rulers" auto action can allow us to not only isolate the rulers of a layer but as well guides. It works for other kind of layers as well

Thanks for listening!