The Photoshop Productivity Series: Automating Photoshop

One-Step Actions

When I demonstrate actions to newbies, one of my greatest fears is that they will get the impression that actions are meant only for applying lots of steps to hundreds of images. Although that’s one of the uses, you could just as easily make actions that have only one step. This could be something as simple as an action to add a drop shadow layer style. You may be thinking, “But Dave, in your first book in this series you talked about making presets—couldn’t I just do that?” And the answer is, “Yes, you could—and, yes, you should also read that book if you haven’t yet.” However, there are two good reasons for making a series of one-step actions:

1. You can apply them easily using Button Mode.

2. You can record an action that ...