Actions 101

This 101 tutorial is written with the beginning user in mind. We know that many of our customers are brand new to digital scrapbooking and want to be sure that we offer a little something for everyone!

1. If you already know what actions are and how to load them in your program, consider this your free pass to skip this little tutorial. If you don’t, read on. Photoshop actions are simply a series of pre-programmed steps for your program to follow. They are timesavers! There are actions for everything from applying a certain color effect to your photograph to resizing your files. Photoshop actions are recognizable by their .atn extension.

2. As long as the .atn files are on your computer, you can load them in Photoshop. You may want to keep them all in one convenient location for ease of reference and information storage. Adobe has created a folder for you which can be found at C:\Program Files\Adobe\Photoshop CS\Presets\Photoshop Actions. This is a handy place to keep them all.

3. Open Photoshop and the image that you would like to work with. On the right side of the screen, you will find the History window. Click on the Actions tab.

There are preset actions that are installed along with Photoshop. These are found in the top folder titled “Default Actions.”

4. To load your own actions, click on the small black triangle in the upper right corner of the History window.

This will bring up a fly out window. On this window, select Load Action. This will bring up another window allowing you to navigate to the action on your computer.

5. Once this is done, highlight the action in the History window, and click Play to start. The Play button is the solid filled triangle at the bottom of the History window.

Once the action is done playing, you can save the results to your computer. In this case, I have selected an action called Coffee B&W by Holly McCaig to recolor my photograph with this soft black and white effect.

It’s that easy! You can even create and save your own actions to speed up tasks that you find yourself performing over and over again.