Last year I tracked every click I made during a client retouching project. Not obsessively, just enough to get a rough picture. By the end of the week, I had opened the same Curves adjustment layer 47 times. Forty-seven. Same move, same starting point, same general direction every single time. That’s not editing. That’s data entry.

If you’re doing anything more than a handful of images a week and you’re not using actions, you’re leaving real time on the table. Not “optimize your morning routine” time. Actual hours.

What an Action Actually Is Under the Hood

A Photoshop action is a recorded sequence of steps stored in a .atn file. When you play it back, Photoshop replays every command you recorded, in order, at whatever speed your machine can handle. Think of it as a macro, but one that lives inside Photoshop’s native Actions panel and integrates directly with Batch processing and Droplets.

What makes actions powerful isn’t the recording itself. It’s that Photoshop stores the commands, not the pixel values. So when you record “add a Curves adjustment layer and bring the midtones up 15 points,” the action doesn’t store your specific image’s tone data. It stores the instruction. Play it on 500 different images and it applies the same logic to each one independently.

That distinction matters because it’s also why actions can break. If your action includes a step like “select layer named Background” and the target file doesn’t have a layer with that exact name, the action stops cold. Good action design means building in flexibility, and I’ll get to that.

Recording Your First Action the Right Way

Open the Actions panel: Window > Actions. Click the folder icon to create a new set. I name mine by project type or shooting condition, something like “Studio Portraits - Soft Light” or “Product Shots - White BG.” Then click the new action icon (it looks like a page with a corner fold), name it, and hit Record.

Now here’s where most people go wrong: they record while already panicked, clicking too fast, undoing things, correcting mistakes. All of that gets recorded. Before you hit Record, rehearse the exact steps once. Then record a clean pass.

For a basic skin retouching action, I typically record: adding a Stamp Visible layer (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+E on Windows, Cmd+Option+Shift+E on Mac), converting it to a Smart Object, applying Camera Raw Filter with my base skin settings (Texture around -15, Clarity around -8, a small luminance smoothing pass in the Detail panel), then adding a black mask to that layer. That last step, adding the black mask, means the effect is hidden by default. I paint it in manually where I need it. The action does the setup; I do the creative work.

Hit the Stop button. You’ve got an action.

Batch Processing: Where the Real Leverage Is

Recording an action is useful. Running it on 300 files while you grab lunch is the whole point.

Go to File > Automate > Batch. Set your source folder, select your action, set a destination folder, and choose how you want files named. I use a naming convention like “YYYY-MM-DD_filename_processed” so I can always tell what was touched and when.

One setting people skip: the “Override Action ‘Open’ Commands” checkbox. If your action includes an Open step (which it shouldn’t, but sometimes people record it by accident), checking this box forces Batch to use its own file-opening logic instead of trying to open whatever specific file you had open when you recorded. Check it. It prevents a lot of confusing failures.

For JPEG output at 90 quality, a folder of 100 layered PSD files averaging 80MB each will finish batch processing in roughly 15 to 20 minutes on a modern machine with a decent GPU. Compare that to 3 to 4 hours of manual work. That math is why I built out my action library over several years. I currently have somewhere north of 400 actions, organized by the kind of logic that makes sense to me, which I admit is a little unusual. My wife thinks it’s ridiculous. I think it’s efficient.

Building Actions That Don’t Break on You

The most fragile part of any action is anything that references a specific layer name, a specific document size, or a specific foreground/background color. The fix is simple: use generic layer names when possible, or add a Stop with a message that reminds you what needs to be true before the action runs.

Insert > Stop lets you add a pause with a custom text message. I use these as sanity checks. Something like: “Make sure Background layer is unlocked before continuing.” The “Allow Continue” checkbox lets the user skip it if they already know what they’re doing.

For actions that include resizing, always record the resize as a percentage, not a fixed pixel value, unless every source file is exactly the same dimensions. If you record “Image Size > 2000px wide” and run it on an image that’s already 1500px wide, you’ve just upsampled it. Scaling to 50% of original is always safer when source sizes vary.

The One Workflow Change Worth Making Today

I started the tutorial side of my work because I genuinely love the moment when something clicks for someone. And automation is one of those things where the click is loud. Once you batch process your first folder and watch Photoshop chew through 200 files without you touching anything, your whole relationship with repetitive work changes.

Build one action today. One. Pick the thing you do every single editing session without thinking, record a clean version of it, and save it to a dedicated action set. Run it tomorrow instead of doing it by hand.

The goal isn’t to automate creativity. It’s to automate everything that isn’t creativity, so when you sit down to actually edit, that’s all you’re doing.