Photoshop Actions

Have you heard of Photoshop Actions? If not, you are missing out on an awesome feature that can save you a lot of time. There are some simple Photoshop Actions allow you to record and save actions that you make. This comes in handy on a lot of different projects, it doesn’t have to be an extensive Photoshop action, a simple action can save you lots of time.

Let’s say you do photo editing and you use the same filters to finalize all your photos, or put a logo watermark on your images. You would create a new action, record and do all the steps necessary. Once done you hit stop. Open an image and go into the actions panel and hit play on your custom action, it will do your saved action in seconds, saving you a lot of time.

I mainly use my own custom Photoshop actions when editing and resizing images for staff pages, like doctors and dentist. I open all images, click on one of them, record my action of resizing, saving as a jpeg, and closing out the document. This makes a huge time difference when some of the offices have 10 team members. Take a look at the video above, it is a quick tutorial of Photoshop actions, in action.

Simple Photoshop Actions Video

Update: I just made of Video of some simple Photoshop actions that can really speed up things. This will help you see how simple photoshop actions are made in a matter of seconds.

You have to remember that any action you do during the record Photoshop action period will be saved. So if you make a layer, color a blue brush on it, and delete it, it will be recorded in your action. I have run into this problem before, where I forget that I am recording an action. You could go back and delete the part of the action, but I prefer to start over from scratch, especially if it is a simple action.

There are a lot of different things you can do with Photoshop actions, including mock-ups. Photoshop action mock-up templates are available online, use google to find them, some are free and some are paid. These are great for doing eBook covers in Photoshop, branding presentations, t-shirts, web sites, the list goes on and on. They can be pricey, but they are worth it, they are great for marketing project mock-ups. There are some free photoshop actions out there on the web you can do a simple google search to find them.