Editing and Managing Actions in Photoshop

The first thing you need to do after you create a new action is to try it out by opening an image and clicking the Play button in the Actions palette. If the action doesn’t perform as you expect, you may need to edit your action to fine-tune it. You also may need to edit an action to add features or change the action’s behavior in some way. For example, you might decide that you want your resizing action to change the size to 45 percent rather than 50 percent. Photoshop enables you to edit your actions fairly easily.

You have a lot of editing options; you can change the action’s name, keyboard shortcut, or color-coding of an action. That’s easy enough: Just double-click the action name in the Actions palette to enter a new name, or select the action, choose Action Options from the palette popup menu, and change the information as desired. You can also hold down the Alt key (Option key on the Mac) and click the action’s name in the Actions palette to open the Actions Options dialog box.

Re-recording an action
As easy as editing an action is, often your best option is to simply re-record the action from scratch. If the action is not long or complex, you can often re-record it in less time then editing the existing action takes.

You can re-record an action two ways:
-->Create a new action from scratch: Perform all the steps again to replace the old action with a new one, saving the action under the same (or a different) filename.

-->Use the clever Record Again feature: Photoshop runs through the steps you already recorded, opening the appropriate dialog boxes used the first time around so you can enter new values.

This method is very handy if you just want to change some of the parameters but keep the steps the same and in the same order. You don’t even have to remember what steps you used. Photoshop runs through them for you as you record the steps, or macro, again.

To re-record a macro with the Record Again option, select the name of the macro you want to re-record and choose Record Again from the palette pop-up menu. As the different dialog boxes appear, enter the values you want and click OK until the macro is finished.

Slowing down action playback

When you play back an action to test it, the action may run too quickly for you to see exactly what is going on. To slow things down, choose Playback Options from the palette pop-up menu and choose a playback speed in the Playback Options dialog box.

Select Accelerated to zip through an action at normal speed; Step by Step to command Photoshop to stop between actions so you can examine what has happened, or Pause For to create a short pause before moving on. If you want to get really fancy, you can select the Pause for Audio Annotation check box and use your microphone to describe what each step does.