Creating custom actions

In order to understand how to create our own actions, we must talk about three things: An Action Set is a category of actions. An action is a series of steps. A Step is a process within an action, such as creating a layer, expanding a selection, or adjusting a combine mode or color value. We'll talk about Action Sets first, then we'll talk about making an action and recording steps in the next section.

Action sets

Remember back in Chapter 3, Palettes of a Different Color, when we discussed making custom color sets? Action sets are pretty much the same thing—a folder storing different actions. You could make an action set for each project that you're working on, or just make one set named Custom where you store the ones that are unique to the way that you work. Or maybe you want to divide them out into Print and Web actions, with different steps for resizing images for display on the Internet or for publication.

For the time being, let's make a set just to store the custom...