How to load actions

Big news hit digiland earlier this week with the release of Adobe Photoshop Elements 11. It’s no surprise that a new version was released since that happens every fall, but this one is a game changer for digi scrappers. No longer do we have to consult a long strand of instructions just to figure out where to put actions! It’s just as simple to install them as it is in Photoshop. In fact, the whole process is very similar!

Want to see? Of course you do! All you have to do is go to the “more” folder on the bottom right hand of the screen and choose the “actions” menu. You will see the actions that you have already loaded.

You can load a new action at any time by choosing the drop down menu on the far top right of the actions menu.

Then you will navigate to where you have stored your purchased actions and load the one you want with one simple click! Once you find your folder with the action you want to install, you might need to choose between PSE or PSCS. You can go ahead and look for a PSE option, but the cool thing is you can just install the action file that comes in the PSCS folder. That’s why it’s so easy to install now, because you only need the action file and not all that extra stuff to trick PSE into working with it.

Now just select the action you want to load. You do have to load them one at a time, there doesn’t seem to be a way to batch load them all at once.

After it’s loaded, just choose the first action listed in the folder and hit the “play selection” button. That’s all there is to it!

The nice thing about this actions feature is that there are several options to clear or reset actions. If you need any further information, you can always check out the “Actions Help” area which leads to this page on the Adobe website.

Want to know an even easier way?

Wendyzine and I have been emailing back and forth the last few days as I’ve been learning all the new tricks in PSE 11. She asked me to check and see if PSE 11 could handle installing actions in the same ways that PSCS could. The answer is yes!

Easy Alternative #1 – When you pull up the list of actions to load, you can just double click on the action you want instead of selecting it and hitting the “load” button.

Easy Alternative #2 – When you are in your folders in Windows Explorer, you can find your actions there and double click on them to install. You just need to be sure that PSE 11 (or a version of PSCS) is the default program for opening actions.

What if you haven’t upgraded to PSE 11 or you don’t use a full Photoshop program? How do you load actions in the other Photoshop Elements programs? We still like to refer you to the free set of instructions that Wendyzine has provided for our readers.  Be sure to check out the path to follow for your specific version. It’s not as intimidating as it seems. I used to be very scared of actions and I just sat down and opened up Wendy’s PDF every time I needed to install one. Before too long, I could do it from memory, without any help. If I can do it, anyone can! That said, I’ll take the new and improved action management of PSE 11 any day!

P.S. The title graphic was created with Kate Hadfield’s movie night doodles