Photoshop Actions How to

Save time with Photoshop Actions

ACTIONS
Whenever you perform repetitive tasks in Photoshop, you can save yourself time and effort using a feature called Actions. For example, if you are always opening a file, resizing it and saving it as a .jpg file for the web, you can create an Action in Photoshop to automatically do this all in one step.

An Action is similar to a macro in a word processing application. It's a series of recorded steps that can be applied to any file. After recording the Action simply open a photograph and click the "Play" button to run the script.

To see an example movie of how to create your own Action click here.

BATCH
After you've created an Action, Photoshop has a Batch function that allows you to run an Action on an entire folder full of photographs! To run a batch:

1. Go to File - Automate - Batch
2. Select the Action Set (Folder) and the Action within that Set
3. Choose your source and destination folders
4. Click OK to run the Action on all of the photographs
   

Another handy feature of Actions is, after creating an Action, you can share it with others who use Photoshop. You can find numerous FREE actions online to download and use in Photoshop.

For a .pdf handout about recording, importing and saving Actions click here.

For a bunch of free Actions and more tutorials about Actions, click here.