In the previous section, we looked briefly at what actions are and why you'd want to use them, and we took a quick look at Photoshop's Actions palette, which is where we do everything from recording, playing, editing, and saving actions to loading in additional action sets. Here, we're going to look at the Default Actions which are automatically loaded in the Actions palette for us.

Photoshop's Default Actions Set

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When we first bring up the Actions palette, we see that Photoshop has loaded a set of actions for us, with the descriptive name "Default Actions":

The Difference Between An "Action" And An "Action Set"

Before we continue, we need to understand the difference between an action and an action set. If you look closely at the actions palette, you'll see a folder icon to the left of the words "Default Actions", and that's essentially what an action set is. It's a folder that contains your actions, just like a folder in a filing cabinet might contain various forms, receipts, and what not. In this case, the Default Actions folder (action set) contains various actions that are automatically loaded into Photoshop for us.

So where are the actions then? They're inside the folder, which brings up the question, "Okay, so how do I open the folder?" To open (and close) a folder, simply click on the triangle to the left of the folder. This will "twirl open" (I love saying that for some reason) the folder, or if the folder was already open, it will close it. Go ahead and click on the triangle. You'll see the folder open and all of the actions inside of it will appear:

Different Default Actions In Photoshop CS2

As I mentioned, I'm using Photoshop CS3 here, but the default actions shown above are the same default actions that Adobe has been including with Photoshop for years, with one exception. For whatever reason, when Adobe released Photoshop CS2, they decided to replace the usual default actions with new ones. If you're using Photoshop CS2, you'll see these default actions instead:

Notice how the name of each action in the list contains the word "workspaces", and that's because the only thing these actions do is allow you to select from the various workspaces that Photoshop comes with. Without getting into details about what workspaces are, let's just say that these default actions in Photoshop CS2 are about as useless as they come. Obviously, the folks at Adobe felt the same way since they switched back to the classic default actions in Photoshop CS3.

Fortunately, if you're using Photoshop CS2 and you want access to those classic default actions, all you need to do is click on the small, right-pointing arrow in the top right corner of the Actions palette to bring up the fly-out menu, then click on Sample Actions from the list of additional action sets at the bottom of the menu:

As soon as you select "Sample Actions" from the list, you'll see the Sample Actions action set appear in the Actions palette directly below the Default Actions set. Click on the triangle to twirl open the Sample Actions folder and you'll see all of the individual actions inside of it. These are the exact same actions that ship as the Default Actions with other versions of Photoshop:

Again, the Sample Actions set is only available in Photoshop CS2 and only because Adobe chose to replace the default actions in CS2 with new ones. From this point on, when I say "default actions" or "Default Actions set", if you're using Photoshop CS2, just know that I'm referring to the actions in your Sample Actions set, which are the default actions in all other versions of Photoshop.

Photoshop's Default Actions

Now that we've cleared up that little issue for Photoshop CS2 users, let's take a look at some of the default actions that Photoshop installs for us. Believe it or not, some of them are actually kind of useful, especially if you're pressed for time and just need a quick and dirty effect. There's 12 different actions that install as part of the Default Actions set, and while we won't look at all of them since you can easily do that on your own, let's check out the first one so we can get a sense of how actions work.

The "Vignette" Default Action

At the top of the list of default actions is one named Vignette (selection):

This action was put together for us by the good folks at Adobe and contains all of the steps necessary to add a classic vignette effect to a photo. The reason Adobe added "(selection)" in the name is because before we run the action, we need to first draw out a selection where we want the vignette to appear. Drawing manual selections isn't something that tends to work well when recorded as part of an action, so Adobe left it up to us to draw a selection first on our own. Some of the other default actions contain "(type)" after their name, and that's because they're meant to be used specifically with type, so you'll want to make sure you've added some type to your document and that you have the type layer selected in the Layers palette before running them. You'll also find an action called "Sepia Toning" with "(layer)" after the name. The "(layer)" part simply tells us that the sepia effect will be applied to whichever layer you currently have selected. With our Vignette selection, we need to draw a selection, but then once we've drawn a selection, all we'll need to do is play the action and Photoshop will do the rest for us!

Here's the photo I want to add a classic vignette to:

As I mentioned, we need to draw out a selection inside the image before we can run the action, so I'll select the Elliptical Marquee Tool from the Tools palette and I'll use it to drag out an elliptical selection roughly in the center of the image:

Before we run the action, let's take a quick look our Layers palette, where we can see that currently, we have only one layer, the Background layer, which contains the original photo. Nothing has been done to the image yet, with the exception of the selection I added a moment ago:

Playing The Action

To play the Vignette action, or any action for that matter, all we need to do is select it in the Actions palette (the currently selected action is highlighted in blue) and then click on the Play icon at the bottom of the palette:

As soon as we click Play, Photoshop begins running through all the steps necessary to complete our effect. In this case, one of the steps involves us choosing a feather radius for the selection we added a moment ago. Feathering a selection makes the selection edges softer. The greater the feather radius, the softer the edges. Now, Adobe could have included a specific feather radius as part of the action, which would avoid us having to choose one ourselves, but since every photo is different, it's preferable that we have the ability to set the feather radius ourselves on an image-by-image basis. We'll learn how to add the option to make changes like this with actions later on. For now, we'll just continue on with our vignette action.

Since we need to specify a feather radius as part of the action, Photoshop automatically pops up the Feather Selection dialog box for us. The default feather radius is 5 pixels which is a bit too small for our vignette effect. I'm going to set my feather radius to 20 pixels, which will make my selection edges nice and soft. Depending on the size of your image, you may want to increase the radius value even further:

Click OK when you're done to close the dialog box. The feather radius is the only option we need to set manually with this action, so Photoshop continues on at this point and completes the vignette effect for us. Here's my final result. Remember, all I had to do was drag out an initial selection and then choose a feather radius. Photoshop did everything else as part of the Vignette action:

Not bad at all, especially considering how little work I had to do myself. Now that the effect is complete, let's take another look at our Layers palette:

Before we ran the action, all we had in the Layers palette was a single layer, the Background layer. With the action and the effect now complete, we can see that Photoshop has added two more layers for us above the Background layer. We can even see by looking at the layer preview thumbnails that the middle layer, "Layer 2", has been filled with solid white and that the top layer, "Layer 1", contains only the part of the original image that was within the initial selection I made. Everything outside of the selection has been deleted. All of this was done automatically by Photoshop as part of the Vignette action.

We'll look at how to view the specific details of an action so we can see exactly what's going on inside our Vignette action next!