Viewing The Steps In An Action

If you recall from our look at the difference between an action and an action set in Photoshop, we learned that an action set is really nothing more than a folder, and that individual actions are placed inside the folder. We learned that we can open a folder (action set) to view the actions inside of it simply by clicking on the small triangle to the left of the folder icon. Clicking on the triangle again will close the folder.

We can do the exact same thing with actions. By default, an action is closed inside the Actions palette, hiding the individual steps that make up the action from view. To twirl open an action and see all of the steps, simply click on the triangle to the left of the action's name. Here I've clicked on the triangle for the Vignette action, and we can now see all of the steps that Photoshop runs through when creating the effect for us:

When playing an action, Photoshop runs through each step in the list from top to bottom until it reaches the end. In the case of the Vignette action, we can see that there's 7 steps which Photoshop completes for us, beginning with "Make snapshot", which creates a snapshot in the History palette of how the image appeared just before we ran the action, and ending with "Move current layer".

Viewing The Details Of Each Step In An Action

Notice how some of the steps also have triangles beside their name. These triangles twirl open the specific details for each step so we can see exactly what's going on. Now we're really getting down to the nitty gritty of how the action works. For example, here I've twirled open the second step in the action, "Feather":

Being able to view specific details of a step is invaluable when trying to figure out why an action you're trying to record isn't working the way you expected, or why it works perfectly with one image but not another. With the details of the Feather step now visible, we can see that the first thing Photoshop tries to do with this step is add a feather radius of 5 pixels to the selection we made before running the action.

Showing And Hiding Dialog Boxes When Playing An Action

Remember what happened though? Instead of automatically applying a feather radius of 5 pixels, Photoshop popped open the Feather Selection dialog box for us so we could enter in our own radius value. Why did Photoshop do that? Why didn't it simply set the radius value to 5 pixels on its own and carry on with the rest of the action? The reason is because Photoshop allows us to decide whether or not we want certain dialog boxes to pop up when an action is playing.

"Wait a minute," you're saying, "I thought the whole point of actions was so Photoshop does all the work for me. Why the heck would I want a bunch of dialog boxes popping up on the screen all the time expecting me to enter values for this and that?" Geez, you really are lazy, aren't you? Well, certainly there will be plenty of times when you won't need Photoshop asking you which values to use for different commands and options. But what would happen, for example, if Photoshop hadn't asked us for a new feather radius value when we ran the Vignette action? It would simply add a 5 pixel feather radius to the selection every time we ran the action, regardless of the size of the image. Since different size images would require a different feather radius value, an action that doesn't give us the option to change the radius value wouldn't be very useful to us.

By default, Photoshop does not pop open dialog boxes when we run actions. It simply uses whatever values we used for the various commands and options when we recorded the action. If we want Photoshop to open a dialog box for us when an action plays, we need to tell it to do so, and the way we do that is by clicking on the dialog box toggle icon to the left of the individual step. By default, the toggle icon is hidden and all we see is an empty square. This means that the dialog box will not appear.

If we look closely at the Actions palette though, we can see that the dialog box toggle icon is appearing to the left of the Feather step (it looks like a small gray dialog box):

With the toggle icon visible, Photoshop knows that when it reaches that step, it needs to display the related dialog box and allow us to enter a new value, if needed, before carrying on with the rest of the action. If we decide we'd rather just skip past the dialog box and allow Photoshop to use whatever values were recorded with the action, all we'd need to do is click on the toggle icon to make it disappear.

Showing Or Hiding All Dialog Boxes For An Action

If you want every step in an action to display its dialog box when the action is played (or at least, every step that has a related dialog box, since not every step will have one), you could click the toggle icon for each individual step on or off, but an easier and faster way is to click on the toggle icon beside the name of the action itself. This main toggle icon controls the toggle icons for all of the individual steps at once. If we look for a moment at the toggle icon to the left of our Vignette action's name, we can see that the icon is currently being displayed, but for some reason it appears red rather than gray:

Photoshop occasionally likes to display things in red because it knows that red tends to make people feel uneasy, even angry, and as everyone knows, Photoshop takes great pleasure in watching us suffer.

Okay, that's not why. When an action's main dialog box toggle icon is displaying in red, it means that at least one, but not all, of the individual steps in the action are currently set to display their dialog box when the action is played. Some dialog boxes are turned on, some are not. That's what the red color means. See? No reason to be angry. If you want to instantly turn all the dialog boxes in the action on, just click on the action's main toggle icon. Photoshop will pop up a warning telling you what you already knew, that you're about to toggle every dialog box in the action either on or off:

Click OK to exit out of the dialog box. And now, if we look again at our Actions palette, we can see that the main toggle icon for the action has changed from red to gray, which now tells us that every dialog box for the action is currently turned on. We can also see all the dialog boxes appearing beside each individual step:

If you want to turn off all dialog boxes for an action at once, click on the main toggle icon once again. Photoshop will pop up the same warning box we saw a moment ago, telling us that we're about to toggle the state of all dialog boxes in the action. Click OK to close out of it, and this time, we can see that all of the toggle icons, including the main one beside the name of the action, have disappeared:

Okay, we've successfully ran our very first action, and we've seen how to view the individual steps that Photoshop runs through to complete the action. We've also looked at how to toggle dialog boxes on and off when an action is playing so we can make any necessary changes to a command or option. Feel free to try out the remaining default actions on your own. Remember that some of the default actions are meant to be used with type, so you'll need some type in your document before running them. If, after running an action, you want to revert back to your original image, you can either press Ctrl+Alt+Z (Win) / Command+Option+Z (Mac) a few times to undo all the steps in the action, or go up to the File menu at the top of the screen and choose Revert to revert your image back to the state it was in when you last saved it. You can quickly access the Revert command by pressing the F12 key on your keyboard.

The default actions may be the only ones that Photoshop loads in automatically for us, but they're not the only actions that Photoshop comes with. Up next, we'll look at how to load in Photoshop's additional built-in actions!

Want an easier way to follow along with our tutorials? Download them as printable PDFs!