Triple T Tuesday - Installing Actions

Hey everyone. Today I’m going to take a second and talk about actions. Actions basically take repetitive tasks and wrap them up into 1 or 2 clicks so you don’t have to worry about all the specific settings. They are a huge time saver! I digi-scrapped for quite awhile before I tried using actions. I didn’t really understand them and always thought they were too hard to deal with so I kept my distance…LOL. How silly I was! I now can’t live without my shadowing actions and my resizing actions.

So, here is what you need to do to install actions into PSE:

1. First of all, find an action that you think will be useful for you. There are TONS of free ones out there for editing pictures and also great scrapbooking actions. Once you’ve found the action you want, download it to a folder you can easily find.

2. Select unzip and extract all the files.

*IMPORTANT* Make sure you have your hidden files showing. You can do this by going to TOOLS–>OPTIONS–>VIEW–>SHOW HIDDEN FILES This was very frustrating to me the first time when I couldn’t figure out why my files weren’t showing up!

3. Make sure PSE is closed. If you are using PSE 6- PSE 9, look through all the files you unzipped and locate the files ending in .atn and .png. (If you are using PSE 5, you’ll need the .psd file for the thumbnail pic) You need to load these files into PSE. The paths are different depending on your operating system.

FOR VISTA and WINDOWS 7
C:–>Program Data–>Adobe->Photoshop Elements–>7.0 (or whatever your version is)–>Photo Creations–>Photo Effects

FOR WINDOWS XP
C:–>Documents and Settings–>All Users–>Application Data->Adobe–>Photoshop Elements–>7.0 (or whatever your version is)–>Photo Creations–>Photo Effects

FOR MAC
LibraryApplication SupportAdobePhotoshop Elements6.0 (or whatever your version is)Photo CreationsPhoto Effect

4. Open PSE. You may not see your action at first. In the effects palette, click the photo effects icon, then show all and you should see it!

Easy peasy! Now, if you want to try it out, Trixie Scraps has a free action to resize your layouts to the perfect web size. You can find it at the end of this Blog Post.

Have fun!