Organizing Action & Organizing Actions!
I love plays on words & that suited me. Today I’m going to link you to ideas for organizing Actions and I’m going to tell you about my own organizing efforts. Hopefully it will help me to be more efficient so I have more time to blog!
What are Actions? Actions are used in Adobe Photoshop & Photoshop Elements. They are a set of steps that are ‘recorded’ or saved & can be used over again & again. The advantage is that it’s a one click effect that initiates any number of steps to achieve the same goal each time. For Paint Shop Pro, the equivalent is Scripts. ACDSee Photo Editor has built in photo adjustments that allow you options for adjusting your photos by selecting from options
Because I don’t use Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, I’m going to link you to my friend Hummie’s blog. She outlines her ideas for organizing her Actions. She also links to her tutorial for converting Photoshop Actions so that they can be used in Photoshop Elements. So if you’re like Hummie & need to get your Actions in order, then try her suggestions:
Hummie’s World: Organizing Actions in PSE
This week when I was looking for something else, another suggestion for organizing Actions were different, so I’ll link you to Katherine’s way too.
And since I don’t have Adobe Actions, I was working on my own organizing. I’ve had my laptop for 8 months & last night spent time organizing all my doc’s & files. What a good feeling! So today I rewarded myself by installing 8 plugins for Window Live Writer. I will play with them & let you know which are worthwhile. And I have a list of ideas to blog about. My next thing is to try to get my blog reader feeds pared down to what I actually read! It must be a laptop housecleaning weekend! (It’s certainly not happening in my house! )
Since I’m rambling I’ll wrap it up with sharing the crazy thing I did on Thursday night - I bought two domain names. Now I used to splurge on paper slabs… did I need them, no? but I bought them anyway. So now I’ve moved on to buying domain names … I think I’m a geek now officially! (maybe you had noticed this already?!). So if any of you wanted conniebensen.com sorry! it’s taken… and I bought another, but I’ll blog on that one later. What to do with them? Well, I’ll have to rely on my sister for that. 
Subscribe to the comments for this post
3 People have left comments on this post
Jul 29, 2007 - 07:07:18LOL…yes, it’s different in different programs!
How funny…shall I try to go to conniebenson.com to see if anything is there? Giggle Fiffle!
I have some ideas saved in windows Live Writer too…and…well…I actually have ideas saved everywhere and should come up with only one method. Then, I need to quit my full time job so I can get it all written and blogged.
Interesting ideas regarding organizing actions! I actually use ACDSee to organize my actions. When downloading or purchasing an action, I now save an image for preview or use the action and create my own preview from the result. I then use this image in ACDSee to organize my actions. I have a separate category for PS Actions but I also assign the actions to various categories, related to their purpose. For instance, if I have an action that creates flowers, I would assign it to my embellishments, flowers category. This then is a cross reference for me. When I go searching for flowers, I see that I have an action that will create one. Or I simply go to my PS Actions category to search. It is then very easy to load the actions by dragging them into Photoshop as they are needed.
I use this same method to organize brushes, styles, shapes, etc. for Photoshop. ACDSee is just the BEST!
My tutorial is for actions in Photoshop Elements only…and I know they work differently in the full version.
In Photoshop Elements, it is not efficient to utilize unless they are installed by placing them in the correct folder.
I think adding a preview of them into ACDSee is a great idea though! I made the multi preview for mine and just open the file before choosing an action, but it would work in ACDsee too.
I guess I need to update the “converting to PSE” instructions on my tut now…sigh…I don’t think it’s complete or all that accurate.