1. shopping
2. toys
3. action figures

Set your imagination free!
Photoshop Actions Guide
Part 1
What they are and how to use them.
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www.creativedrawer.com
Photoshop Actions Guide, Part 1 What they are and how to use them, by Walton Mendelson for Creative
Drawer. This guide is included free with all Creative Drawer Creative Actions.
Photoshop Actions Guide, Part 2 How to make you own, by Walton Mendelson for Creative Drawer, due
out summer, 2009.
Copyright © 2009 Walton Mendelson
You may print this PDF for personal or educational use. You may not alter the PDF, claim authorship
for it, or redistribute it for other than personal or educational use.
All rights reserved.
For Photoshop actions, brushes, etc. please visit
www.creativedrawer.com
Photoshop is a registered trademark of Adobe.
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Table of Contents
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Introduction—Some thoughts about actions. Too often overlooked,
but they are some of the most powerful and useful tools in Photoshop.
5
Basic Definitions—The terminology isn’t complicated, but there are
a few things you need to know.
6 Quick Start—If you’re like me, you’ll read everything tomorrow, but
today you want to get started. It’s as easy as 1-2-3.
7 Anatomy of the Actions Palette—Photoshop has done little to make
Actions sexy. The Actions Palette is utilitarian, and a bit daunting.
11 Running and Managing Actions—A few tips about running and
managing actions.
15 Trouble Shooting—When they work . . . A few things you can do
when they don’t.
16 Resources—Where you can find more.
16 Creative Drawer Creative Actions—A list of our actions, features
and benefits.
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Introduction
You’ve probably seen the Actions Palette.
You may have been curious and looked into
actions, and read that if there is something
repetitive that you do to all your photographs,
such as add a copyright notice or resize them,
this can be recorded and played back for each
new image or batch of images. But “I don’t do
that sort of thing,” you said, just as I did. Perhaps you tried some of Photoshop’s actions
and wondered what the fuss was.
But actions are so much more. Yes, you
can record your own actions—and once you
learn how to write an action you’ll be surprised at how often you might find a use for
them—but they can be very much like filters or plug-ins.
In working with students over the years I
have heard fairly common fears: I’m afraid
I’ll erase it if I hit record instead of play.
They are confusing, so many steps. Things
pop up and then disappear. They don’t work,
I’ve tried them. They’re not creative. My response: don’t worry.
Although Photoshop stores its actions
in Presets>Actions, Photoshop does not
load them when it opens, as it does with filters. Therefore, you can store your actions
anywhere you want on your computer. We
recommend this because if you start accumulating actions, organizing them is easier
if you get used to storing them where you
want.
When you load an action set, its original
is safe in its folder. If you should mess up an
action while playing with it, just throw it out
and reload the original. Actions can be run in
two modes: list or button. In the list mode, all
of the steps in an action can be twirled open,
and individual steps can be twirl opened.
Button mode is just that: each action is a button. Click to play. If you’ve been bothered
by little pop-up windows that disappear and
leave you confused, well, that’s the fault of
the action’s creator. We feel that all actions
should be well named (not “action 1,” “action 2”) and an action set should include a
page or two describing how the actions run.
Actions often are interactive, asking the
user to enter or approve an individual actions, such as the amount of blur. As a courtesy, the author should tell the user what to
expect when running an action, then the
little pop-up windows aren’t so annoying.
As for actions not working, our experience is that over half the thousands of actions we’ve downloaded and tried don’t
work. Sometimes it’s version of Photoshop
that they were created in, sometimes the actions only work when run step-by-step, and,
most often, they just don’t work. If you didn’t
pay for them, it’s hard to get too angry.
Finally, actions are creative to make and
just as creative as filters to use. We hope you’ll
take some time to look at actions as one of
the best tools Photoshop has to offer.
This guide will go from the general “let’s
get started” instructions to more detailed
information. So “let’s get started.”
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Basic Definitions
Action: A recorded set of steps (operations
and commands) that have been applied to
an image, and that can be applied to other
images by replaying the recorded steps.
Just as an action is made up of action
steps, an action set is made up of actions,
which are in action set files distinguished
by the .atn extension and contained in an
action icon.
Action Icons (Basic):
Atn: the file extension for a Photoshop action
set.
Action Palette Menu Commands:
Button Mode: This toggles between list mode
and button mode
Clear All Actions:* The clears/deletes all actions from the Actions Palette.
Delete: Deletes selected action step, action,
or action set
Duplicate: duplicates selected action step, action or action set.
Insert Menu Item: Permits inserting a command that cannot be recorded when recording.
Insert Path: Permits inserting a path into an
action.
Insert Stop: Starts the Stop Command dialog,
which can be used to insert a message
inside an action.
Load: Permits loading an action set.
New Action: Starts the New Action dialog.
New Set: Starts the New Action dialog
Play: Plays all steps in a selected action
Playback Options: access playback options,
such as speed or audio annotation.
Record Again: Plays an action, during which
all dialog boxes are displayed, even ones
turned off.
Reset Actions:* replaces the actions in the actions palette with Photoshop’s default actions.
Replace Actions:* replaces the actions in the
actions palette with the action set of your
choice.
Save Action: Saves an action set.
Stop Recording: stops recording.
Actions Set: action set name.atn
Play icon: ready and
playing
Record icon: ready,
available, recording
Stop icon: ready, mouse
over
New Set
New Action
Trash (Delete)
Action options: starts the actions options
dialog.
Actions palette: The actions palette has all
the actions related commands and controls.
Action palette menu: This is a popup menu
that lists actions related commands.
Action set: Individual actions can only be
saved in sets of actions.
Action step: an individual operation or command within an action: applying a filter
or image adjustment, adding or moving a
layer, adding a layer mask etc.
* These commands delete the existing actions from the Actions
Palette. If you have modified or created an action it will be lost
if it is has not been saved.
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Quick Start
would have to remember each of the steps. Lots
of actions aren’t just about doing something
over and over, but about doing sometimes hundreds of steps without forgetting any of them.
There are several things to note with this action: It has a clear, descriptive name. It requires
a minimum size image, and it uses a stop to advise you. It makes a snapshot of your image before it runs, so that you can restore the image to
its original state.
If you are running actions that you do not
know, always work with a duplicate image. Yes
there are history steps, and you can always close
the image without saving it, but when things
go wrong they go wrong. It’s a good workflow
habit to make sure you use a duplicate image.
To run other actions, you will need to access
the Action Palette Menu. In the upper right
corner of the Action Palette there is a button:
or
, click on it to open the menu.
Now, you can select load, navigate to the location of your actions, and select the set you want
to run.
Some actions won’t run except in Button
Mode, and, of course, you may prefer Button
Mode anyway. On the Action Palette Menu, select Button mode. To run an action, just click
on the Button.
The next section, Anatomy of the Actions
Palette will show you where things are located, and the previous section, Basic Definitions, will define basic words.
If you have never tried an action: open an
image in Photoshop. Then:
1) Open the Actions Palette. If you don’t
see a tab called “Actions,” click F9 or
Windows>Actions to bring up the Actions Palette.
2) Select the Photoshop default actions.
3) Twirl open the action set.
4) Click on Wood frame-50 pixel
5) Click on the play button (
).
As soon as the actions starts, there will be
a message window:
This is a stop that permits the author of the
action to alert the user to something. Click
Stop to stop the action at that point. Click
Continue to continue the action. Click Continue and watch the action do its magic.
This action is twenty-two steps, and it
shows you the power of actions. You could
create exactly such a frame yourself, but you
These actions are in Button Mode. After a stop that
requires input from you, if you are required to restart
the action, the button will turn bright red. Click on it
to continue.
To open the Actions Palette in the Default Workspace: Click on B, which opens the History/Actions
Palette (or F9 or Windows>Actions). Click on the
Actions Tab. To go to Button Mode, click on the
Actions Options Tab, then click Button Mode.
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Anatomy of the Actions Palette
The Action Palette
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The Action Palette Menu
8
Button Mode
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Enable-Disable Key in List Mode
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Running and Managing Actions
Running New Actions
I hope that you’ve tried some actions and
haven’t hit a wall yet. There are hundreds of
thousands of actions available on the internet. From my experience, about half don’t
work. They fail because they were written
with a bottom layer called “Aunt Tildy” and
not called “Background” or “Layer 0”; how
could you ever know? They fail because a
step was turned off, or a critical dialog was
suppressed. They fail because they require a
filter or operation available in a more recent
version. And sometimes I think they just
fail because: why? because.
Actions run inside Photoshop using Photoshop commands. They do not operate outside it. For the most part, the worst they can
do is destroy an image or cause Photoshop
to freeze up. So there’s no reason not to try
actions you’ve found online. The safest way
to run any action is simple, always run new
actions on a copy of your image.
If you run an action called “Action 1” and
it adds a nice blue cast to your image, rename it “Blue Cast.” See Renaming later in
this section.
When you first run an action, accept the
default settings until you know what to expect.
If you do not have a guide for the action
that lists the stops and settings you have to
make, I strongly recommend that you run
the actions and write down what settings
you will have to make. Note particularly
Stops that tell you to do several things after
you click Continue or Stop.
Organizing Actions
I recommend that you keep a folder of actions outside Photoshop. If you get hooked,
you’ll have hundreds of action sets in no time.
Organizing them is only a pain if you don’t
ever use them. Photoshop will list all the actions in its Actions folder (Presets>Actions)
on the Actions Palette Menu. If you keep
everything in Photoshop you’ll never figure
out what you have.
You can create folders for actions by author, or type, or favorite: whatever makes
the most sense to you.
For the same reasons, I would also suggest if you collect brushes, styles, shapes, or
patterns, to keep them in directories outside
of Photoshop.
If you alter or revise an action, I recommend saving it with a new name. Double
clicking on an Action Name or Actions Set
name, lets you rename the actions or set.
New Actions for the Paranoid
Let me repeat, actions run inside Photoshop using Photoshop commands. They do
not run outside of Photoshop. According to
experts you won’t get a virus or trojan from
an Action, and in and of themselves, they
can’t do much harm.
If you’re suspicious or paranoid, you
might look through the steps in List Mode
to see if the action calls a command like
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Purge Histories or Purge All, or if it invokes
a script. Scripts can be destructive and Actions can execute Photoshop scripts. Most
of us do not use scripts, however if you have
a script, you should know what it does before you run it. Here are two script icons to
look for:
and Pause for X seconds. The problem is
that the first two might not make much difference, and the Pause for setting pauses for
a set time—usually too long here and too
short there.
A better approach, which I have used on
some actions that do not run but should, is
to literally run the action step-by-step. Although this guide is not about writing and
debugging actions, you may want to alter an
action: enabling or disabling a dialog box,
or adding, suppressing or permitting a stop.
To do this, you need to figure out where in
the action things are. There are several ways
that give you control over the pacing:
• Select the step you want to play.
• Hold Ctrl, and click Play (
). This
plays the action. To play the next step, repeat these steps.
To play a sequence of steps, or the entire action step-by-step:
• Select the first step you want to play.
• Hold Ctrl and double click the action step.
The step will play then the next step will
be made active (highlighted).
• Double click the action steps as they are
highlighted.
This is my preferred method. On a long action, which could have hundreds of steps,
it is easy to lose track of where you are. As
long as you remember that if the step is
highlighted it is the next step in the action,
you won’t get lost—at least not as easily.
A script may be in text file. If you open it
and it looks like code, it’s probably a script
file. Again, be sure you know what it does
before you run it.
Most actions do not invoke scripts. And
when you download actions, you’ll see in
the files what you have before you run anything. The only other word of warning is zip
files themselves.
Zip files can contain viruses or trojans.
Scan downloaded zip files before you unzip them. People selling actions (or scripts)
want your business, and people/sites giving
them away with their name clearly out front,
are not likely to be the source of a virus, trojan, or malicious script. Scanning downloads is simply a good practice. However,
you should be wary of sites selling Creative
Suite 4 for $5.00.
Running an Action Step-by-Step
In List Mode you change the playback
speed (this is not available in Button Mode):
Actions Palette Menu>Playback Options.
Although intended to help in writing and
debugging actions, some actions can be dizzying as they run. Slowing them down can
be helpful.
The options are Accelerated, Step by Step,
Suppressing a Stop
If an action has lots of Stops that tell you
about the author’s name, his family, hobbies,
and vacation plans, you can suppress them:
• Set the Actions to List Mode
• Twirl open the Action
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• Find the offending Stop, and uncheck the
first box or first and second boxes:
mark in the first column in front of the
Action Name will be red. Click it once,
and it will turn on all steps. Click it again
and it will suppress all steps.
• As long as you have not saved this faulty
action over the original action in your
files, you can throw it out and reload the
original.
A.This is a Stop in List Mode.
B. This is the Stop twirled open. You can
read the message, and determine if this is
the stop you want to suppress.
C. The Stop has been suppressed, the Step
will be skipped, the dialog is irrelevant.
D. The Stop has been suppressed, the Step
will be skipped, and the dialog has been
disabled.
Do not disable the dialog only: the action
will stop and that is that.
Double clicking inside the Stop layer will
bring up the Stop, letting you edit the text.
A. This Step is enabled, but the dialog is not:
therefore, the Step is play without any input from you.
B. This is the Step twirled open. It sets a radius of 10 pixels. But suppose you want to
control the amount of feathering?
C. Click the second box to show the dialog. Now, when the action is played, the
Feather dialog box will appear. It will be
set for a radius of 10, but you can adjust
it. Clicking Okay in the dialog continues
the actions.
D. The Step has been suppressed, so the action will skip it, even if there is a Dialog.
E. The Step has been suppressed and the Dialog disabled.
Skipping a Step may or may not foul up
the action. You will only know this by trying it out.
Enabling and Disabling
If an action has a setting for something
like Feather that just happens without any
input from you, you can force the action to
stop and display the dialog box, letting you
change the setting.
In the chart below, the first column with
checks permits a step to be skipped (enabled
with a check, disabled with no check). The
second column with the little window-withknobs causes the action to pause, display
the dialog, and let you adjust the setting. Of
course, it is possible to disable enough things
to make the action useless. If this happens
and you cannot get back to what works:
• If you have suppressed a step the check
Adding a Stop
If you like an action but it is confusing,
you can add Stops and type in (255 charac13
Duplicating and Deleting
ter maximum) a brief message. Remember,
you will have to save the Action Set to keep
the stop.
In List mode, locate where you want a
Stop: that is between which two Steps. Make
the Step before where you want the Stop active. Click open the Actions Palette Menu
and click on Insert Stop.
You can duplicate and delete Action Sets,
Actions, and Action Steps. Select the Set,
Action, or Step, then either:
• Click on Duplicate or Delete in the Actions Palette Menu. Or,
• Drag the Action Set, Action, or Step to
the trash can at the bottom of the Palette to
delete, or drag to New Action icon next to
the trash can to duplicate.
Remember that in Button Mode these
icons are not available.
Button Mode Button Colors
You can type up to 255 characters including spaces. Click OK when you’re done.
There is no spell check when entering your
text.
Allow Continue: This can be confusing.
In most cases you check Allow Continue.
When you run the action the Stop will appear and you will have two choices Continue or Stop:
Continue: this closes the Message box and
the action continues.
Stop: this closes the Message box and the
action remains stopped until you click
Play (
).
If your actions are in List Mode, open the Actions Palette Menu and click on Button Mode
to display the actions in Button Mode. Because
you don’t see all the steps wiz by, and you can’t
enable or disable anything, this is a convenient,
easy, and safe way to run actions. And some actions will only work in Button Mode.
In Button Mode, Photoshop’s Photoshop
Actions use seven of the available eight colors:
Yellow: image effects
Green: type effects
Orange: frames, borders, vignettes
Purple: production
Blue: textures
Light gray: video
Dark gray: commands
Red is unassigned.
There is no general consensus about what
colors are assigned to an action. Color coding is not required. It is accessed first selecting an action then going to the Actions
Palette Menu and clicking Action Options.
This opens a dialog where you can set the
color. If no color is selected, the action will
appear light gray in Button Mode.
Renaming
Actions and Action Sets can be renamed.
Double click the Action or Action Set layer.
A box will appear around the name and the
name will be highlighted. If you start typing
the name will be overwritten. If you click after the name, unhighlighting it, you can alter it. Actions and Action Sets can have the
same name.
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Trouble Shooting
• Actions written in a foreign language edition of Photoshop, will look for layer
names that won’t necessarily be there in
the English version. Translate the layer
names and rewrite the Action; or delete the
action.
• Actions often start working from the base
layer. If it was developed using a base layer
“Background” but your image starts with
“Layer 0” it might not work. Change your
layer name, or reconstruct the Action.
• If an Action requires that a selection be active before you run it but you have no selection, the Action will fail. Make a selection, and if you like the Action add a Stop
Message about having a selection first.
• Actions can invoke filters, textures, patterns, or brushes that might not exist on
your computer. Either get what is missing
or scrap the Action.
• Some commands won’t work in certain color spaces (e.g. CMYK, RGB, LAB, Grayscale). Figure out what mode is required,
then if you like the action add a Stop Message about the required image mode.
• Some commands won’t work on certain
image formats: the usual offender is files
with indexed colors, such as gif files.
If your image’s layer name is Index, you
should convert it to RGB before trying any
action.
• An action won’t play. Check the steps and
see if anyt steps have been disabled.
If Photoshop acts weird (or weirder than
usual) consider deleting Photoshop’s Preference File. (Hold down Alt + Ctrl + Shift just
after starting Photoshop.)
As I said before, half the actions I’ve
downloaded don’t work, but I assume that
most of them worked for someone at least
once. And anyone who make actions has
had exactly that experience: it worked yesterday but not today.
If you are serious about learning actions,
fixing them when they don’t work is a great
learning tool. One way to follow, debug, or
learn actions is to deconstruct them. You
can open all the Action Steps in List Mode,
and play the action step-bystep. Another
way is to print out all the action steps:
• Select any Action Set.
• Open the Actions Palette Menu.
• Hold down Alt + Ctrl, and click on Save
Actions.
• The file name box will appear with the
name Actions.txt, you can change the
name to something more meaningful and
you can save it where you want.
You will have saved all the actions and actions steps, in a text file. Please note: you
will save all the actions in your actions palette. If that’s a lot, replace them with the
Action Set you are interested in. If I only
want to look at one action, I find it easier
convert the entire set text and open the file
in Word, using Find to locate the action I
want, than to create an Action set with only
the one action I want.
In Photoshop Actions Guide Part 2, on
creating Actions, I will look at what can go
wrong in detail. For this section, I want to
list a few of the things to look for that are
easy to find, although not necessarily always
easy to correct:
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Resources
Photoshop Actions—The Mother of All Tutorials, by Danny J. Raphael. This 293 page
Word file covers just about everything and
then some. It is available free at http://
www.atncentral.com/links.htm.
Al Ward’s Photoshop Productivity Toolkit:
over 600 Time Saving Actions. Sybex, 2004.
ISBN 0782143342
Photoshop CS2 Action and Automation,
Deke McClelland, at http://www.lynda.com.
A great series of video talks on Actions and
so much more.
Action Central, The Photoshop Action Exchange, http://atncentral.com. This site
has thousands of actions, by catagory
(B&W Conversion, Editing, Framing,
Image enhancement, Sharpening, Sketch
and Watercolor) or by developer.
ActionFX Photoshop Resources, www.actionfx.com. Lots of free and not so free
Photoshop resources, including actions.
Creative Drawer Creative Actions
Creative Drawer, www.creativedrawer.
com, is a small site dedicated to digital
graphic art: graphics for scrapbookers, artists, hobbyists, Creative Brushes, Creative
Photo Masks, and Creative Actions for Photoshop users.
• Our Actions come with a PDF showing
each action with an illustrated, stop-bystop description so you aren’t in the dark
as what is happening and how: 1-2 pages
per action.
• Each action duplicates your image first, so
even if you forget to work with a copy we
don’t.
• We delete unnecessary layers, but we keep
those that can be adjusted for more or less
of each effect. Most of our actions keep
the original image, so you can turn on
and off the effect to compare. However,
at the end of the each action you could
simply flatten it—the option should be
yours.
The cover of this PDF shows a few of our
Creative Actions: Cold Morning (snow &
frost), Vignette, Selective B&W, Rounded
Corner, Selective Color , Sensual Color
Auburn, Paper Curl (with color and drop
shadow).
Set your imagination free!
Photoshop Actions Guide, Part 1, © 2009 Walton Mendelson
www.creativedrawer.com
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