Now you might have noticed when I was going through all those special effect that was kind of tedious, probably as the viewer, you are sitting there thinking, okay go, go, go, make something pretty, hurry up Chad, and I was going as fast as I could. Would it be cool if there is a way that Photoshop would automate that process and there is, as a matter of fact throughout Photoshop there are many ways to automate our work-flow.

So if I know that I am going to use certain effects over and over and over again, I can create what's called an action. Just a simple set of actions that Photoshop records that I could playback over-and-over again.

Likewise in these dialog boxes here, fiddling with these settings, would it be so cool if I could just save this preset and use it over-and-over again? Well, I can do that here. Simply hit Save and it will save this level's preset because I mean the Levels dialog box. Later on if I want to use this same preset, in other words the same adjustment, I simply hit the Load button and navigate to where on my hard drive I store the saved levels settings File.

Another way I can automate my work-flow inside of Photoshop is by going to the File Menu and selecting Automate. All of the options I have here are ways that Photoshop will automatically do something for me. Specifically we are going to cover web photo gallery which makes a photo gallery for the Internet, even a Flash website of your photos from scratch in the click of a button. We are going to cover that extensively and Photomerge which takes pictures and automatically stitches and blends them together to create a beautiful panorama, and there are few others here that are pretty self-explanatory. Picture Package is another great one.

We are not going to cover it in this strings series, but essentially what it does is that it takes pictures and arranges them for you on a piece of paper. Let's say, for example, you have this beautiful blue vortex of glowing fire and light and you want to make 16 wallets of this beautiful blue glowing vortex. Simply select Picture Package and you can select from a group of preset template, it will automatically arrange your images in the most efficient way possible.

Great, if you are doing photo editing or printing prints and you need a certain amount of copies and you need to fit them, the best way on a page, it will automatically lay it out for you and conserve the most space.

Now again you are going to hear me stress automation over and over and over again throughout the training series, don't do something and Photoshop will do it for you automatically. It takes one second to hit that Save button in the Presets dialog and yet so few people take advantage of this great option in Photoshop.