Accessing & Running Actions in Photoshop Elements
Ok, so you’ve successfully navigated the morass of installing actions into Photoshop Elements. What next? How to run these actions? Don’t worry, it’s much easier than installing them was!
Just one note – these screen shots came from PSE 7. PSE 6 & 8 are nearly the same, and PSE 5 is close. So don’t worry which version you’re using for this tutorial.
- First off, open Photoshop Elements and look for your Effects Palette. It will probably be on the right somewhere. If you can’t find it, go to the Window menu and select Effects. Here is a screen shot of the right hand side of my PSE workspace with the Effects Palette open. If the arrow next to the word Effects is pointing to the right, click it to expand the Palette.
- Here is a close up of this Effects Palette:
- You can see I made some scribbles in the screen shot above. To find the actions you’ve installed, make sure you’ve selected the button under the yellow arrow for Photo Effects. Otherwise, you’ll be looking at Filters or Layer Styles, which you don’t want right now.
- Next, see the square that I drew around the double arrows? Click on that. If you see the words Show Names in the resulting menu, click that line. If you see the words Hide Names, don’t do anything. Showing the names under the action’s thumbnail will help you find the action you’re looking for.
- Finally, I put a circle around the words Show All. Sometimes, actions come in groups that can be filtered using this list. You’ll know it if you have installed actions like this – you will have installed multiple ATN files and XML files at one time.
- Ok, now that we have the actions displayed appropriately, make sure that you are starting with a flattened image. A flattened image only has one layer, and this layer’s name is Background. To check, look in your Layers Palette (go to Window/Layers if this palette isn’t showing). A flattened image’s Layers Palette looks like this:
- An image that isn’t flattened has a Layers Palette more like this next screen shot. To flatten it, right click on one of the Layers in the Layers Palette and select Flatten Image.
- Are you ready? If you have a flattened image, you are. Double click up in the Effects Palette on the thumbnail that you want to run. (Even if you don’t have a thumbnail picture for this particular action, it might be ok. It is possible to install an action correctly without installing a corresponding thumbnail image, which is usually a PNG file. In this case, you will have a black box instead of an image.)
- After running the action, you will most likely (depending on the action) end up with a Layers Palette that looks similar to the unflattened image above. In fact, if you run the Texas Chicks Sharpening Powerhouse, your Layers Palette will look a whole lot like the image above!
- Your next steps will be modifying the layers to perfect your image. This could involve layer opacity, layer mask painting and turning layers on and off.
If you need more help with those steps, check out the following tutorials:
