A friend of mine taught me this invaluable tool this week, and I believe it is worth sharing. For those of you who haven’t been introduced to the actions palette in Photoshop, here we go – a basic lesson in saving time…


If you have lots of images, and you want to, for example, resize them all to the same dimension, the actions palette can do all this for you in a few easy steps. You won’t have to do the same thing over and over again on 200 images.


Open one of the images you want to resize. And open the actions palette (Window > Actions, or Alt+F9). Now press the ‘create new action’ button in the bottom bar of the actions palette. You will have to name your new action, and press record. Any changes that you make to this image, will now be recorded. You will notice the red recording button on the actions palette is turned on. You can stop it at any moment with the square button, and turn it on again. Photoshop will save the history of your actions. Resize, change colour, even save for web! Do whatever you want, but remember that these actions are meant to have the same effect on all the coming images. When you’re satisfied, save and close your image and stop recording. Now open the next image, and simply press the play button on the actions palette. Everything you’ve just done, will be repeated on this image! It is amazing, and really does save a lot of time…