The Photoshop Productivity Series: Automating Photoshop

Actions Available to All Documents

Think of something you do all the time in Photoshop that takes more than one click. Wouldn’t it be nice to achieve that end result with only one click?

Here’s an example: centering a layer horizontally and vertically relative to the page. To do that manually, you have to choose Edit > Select All, select the Move tool, and click the center vertically and center horizontally buttons in the Options bar. That’s a total of four clicks. Instead, if you record an action, going forward it takes only one click to center a layer in a document. We’ll see how to record this action shortly, after we cover some important basics about actions.

Once created or imported into Photoshop, actions are built into the application ...