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Using Actions in Photoshop

By frog on December 30th, 2008

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This tutorial will teach you how to use actions in Photoshop CS. An action is a set of commands Photoshop will execute once you click the play button on the actions palette.

Depending on the action you can achieve results automatically by doing little or nothing yourself. Photoshop comes with a default set of actions that you can start to experiment with but you can download others from the web by performing an appropriate search for them.

Step 1

Select actions

To open the actions palette, go to Window and click on Actions or press Alt + F9. This will open a new palette.

Actions Palette

Above you can see the Actions palette. Mine doesn’t have the standard set but yours probably will if this is the first time you have opened it.

Step 2

Organising Actions

Actions are organised in folders, each folder can contain multiple actions. To see what’s inside a folder you click on the arrow in front of the folder icon. A list will drop down showing all the Actions.

Step 3

Using actions

To execute an Action you must first select it in the list of Actions. Then you click the Play button and the action will be executed. Make sure to use a copy of your image before trying out an Action.

Step 4

Load in a new action part 2

So you have downloaded some new Action sets but now you need to get them into Photoshop to use them.

If you want to load Actions you have to click on the little blue round button with the arrow in the Actions palette itself. Now you are shown a drop down menu like the one on the right. From this list select Load Actions.

Load a new Action part 3

A navigator window will pop up where you can select the downloaded Actions from the download location. A Photoshop Actions set always uses ATN as it’s extension. Now select the Action and click Load.

Once you have down this a new folder will appear in your Actions palette which you can select and use. That’s all folks, enjoy!

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