Photoshop’s Built-In Actions: Commands

By Dawn Pedersen · 03/31/2009 ·

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Photoshop actions allow you to record a series of steps that you might do numerous times on other images, and then play back that series automatically on a new image. Photoshop CS4 comes with dozens of actions already created for you. In this article, I’ll give a pictorial and descriptive run-down of Photoshop’s built-in Commands actions.

See Related Posts at the end to click through to the other built-in action sets.

Playing Built-In Actions

To open a non-Default set of built-in actions:

Window > Actions
Click on the menu icon at the top-right corner of the Actions panel.
Look near the bottom of the menu where there is a list of seven sets (such as “Image Effects”).
Select a set. It will added below the Default Actions set.

Actions Panel Menu

Click the gray triangle to the left of the action set you just added, to open the list.
Select an action, and click the Play selection button at the bottom of the Actions panel.

Play Action

You can find more ready-made actions at the Photoshop Exchange.

Commands

I won’t go into these actions in great detail, because there’s no great detail to them. They are almost all one-step actions, and they are listed in the Actions panel to either 1) give you a single place to do any of these common tasks, or 2) let you know what all the F keys do. Here’s a rundown: