DIGITAL UP MAGAZINE MOVEMENT & DYNAMICS ACTIONS PHOTOSHOP Create highly detailed energy effects from your photos easily. Photoshop actions are here to save you hours, days, even weeks of hard work... Since its first appearance, almost 30 years ago, Photoshop has become de facto the »Swiss army knife«, the tool of choice for most digital image manipulations and the most used application among modern designers. Inaddition to great standard image processing tools it has contained almost from the start, two major features made it later what it is today: layers and actions. Layers came pretty early in Photoshop’s development and, with layer masks allowing non-destructive seamless blending of images among separate layers, layers made Photoshop the most versatile and widely used app in the world. The reason is that almost everything starts with images, except maybe music, strictly speaking. That’s why Photoshop is widely used by all creatives, photographers, all sorts of designers, layout artists, and even by video editors, 3D animators and film makers. The second major addition to the core engine, which made Photoshop the power tool in most graphic productions, is the introduction of actions and the ability to record and save them for later replay. That’s why we decided to start this multipart story about Photoshop secrets and tricks with PSD ACTIONS. Of course, not all actions are created equal! Most often actions are simply used to automate mundane, repetitive tasks in graphic production - resizing, processing or enhancing dozens, hundreds, even thousands of images.