Photoshop CC: The Missing Manual

Managing Actions

If you don’t get your action quite right the first time (and most likely you won’t, which is perfectly normal), you can go back and edit it, though it’s usually easier to just start over from scratch. That said, the Actions panel’s menu has a few commands that can help you whip misbehaving actions into shape:

• Record Again. When you choose this option, Photoshop runs through all the steps in the action and opens all the dialog boxes associated with them so you can adjust their settings, and then updates the action accordingly.

  Tip

  When you’re troubleshooting an action, it can be helpful to run the action one step at a time; as you run each step, you can see it applied in the image and in your Layers panel, and therefore figure out where the action went astray. To run an action step by step, simply ⌘-double-click the step you want to start with in the Actions panel (Ctrl+double-click on a PC), or single-click a step and then ⌘-click (Ctrl-click on a PC) the panel’s Play button. (Remember, you have to click the flippy triangle next to the action’s name to see the individual steps within the action.) This maneuver also lets you nest an existing action inside a new action that you’re currently recording, as explained in the second Tip on Tip.

• Insert Menu Item. For some unknown reason, when you’re creating an action, you can’t record any items in the View and Window menus (think zooming in or out of your document, fitting it onscreen [very helpful when sharpening], or arranging ...