Now let's take a look at exactly how to play through an action here inside of Photoshop and also if you had an external action, how would you go about loading that into the Actions Panel, so that you could go ahead and play through whatever action that it is that you load in.

So what I am first going to do is I am going to move the Options bar down a little bit because I need to get access to the Actions Panel tab here. Just going to drag out the Actions Panel and bring it out into my Image window like so. I will move my Options bar right back up like that and so what we want to do is we want to take a look at here how to go ahead then and play through one of these actions here.

So I am going to go ahead, I am going to stop recording that action that we just did there, that little play action that we had there. Now I am going to twirl open the Default Actions set up here at the very top of the Actions Panel. Now the first action that I am going to select inside of here is called Sepia Toning (layer) and if I twirl this open you will see here there are several steps inside of this action here, such as Make a snapshot.

By the way, I will be explaining exactly what Make a snapshot means later on. It's a very cool trick that's going to help you with your History States and that kind of stuff like I talked about earlier. It also makes new layer. It merges the visible layers and when I twirl that open you can see here it says, Merge Visible with Duplicate, Desaturate right underneath there. So it's going to desaturate the layer and then it's going to make a New adjustment layer with a Clipping Mask, Colors, it sets the Adjustment hue and saturation, it sets all the values. So anytime you need to see exactly what a step of an action does, go ahead and twirl open these little triangles here and it's going to show you the exact parameters of each individual step that is located within that action.

So anytime you have a question about what a specific action does, like let's say for instance, you forgot to name it some thing clever, like let's say, it just say Action 1, you can go in and twirl some of these open just to kind of see exactly what it's going to do and get your bearings about how it's going to affect your image.

Now that we have seen kind of what an action looks like once it's been recorded, how do you go ahead and bring in a new action. Well that's actually very simple. You come up here to this little fly down menu at the side of the Actions Panel and all you are going to do is come down here and choose Load Actions like so. So if you had any actions here to load which you can do simply by let's say, we need to go into our Applications menu and we will choose Photoshop CS3 inside of the Presets menu, we have an Actions folder in here.

So inside the Actions folder let's say, we want to load the Frames.atn and these are just all the actions that shipped with CS3. So you don't have to worry about finding these in another place, they are always going to be in this Presets folder. Let's go ahead and load Frames.atn and when you do that, you will see here you get this whole set of Actions that are loaded right into your Actions Panel full of different framing effects that you can add to your image.

So I am going to go ahead and I will just go and I will select Ripple Frame from these Actions here and we will twirl that open to see exactly what it does and as you can see here there are several different steps that it goes through here. And so let's go ahead and we will play this action now. Let me scroll down so you will be able to see this entire action inside the frame.

So we will play through this action simply by clicking the Play button and we will see exactly how this affects our current image. So I will go ahead and I will click Play, there you see it goes through all of those steps and then at the very end as it finishes it off, we have that nice little ripple border effect here on the image.

Now if we wanted to go back to our original image, there are several different ways you can do this. The easiest of which is just go to File, Revert and we will choose to go back there simply because they had all those steps right there. Now I am going to show you a way to have a one click undo as far as undoing all those steps rather than going to the File, Revert menu, but that's for another Chapter, so we won't worry about that right now.

But, as you can see it's very simple to play through these actions and also very simple to load them. So in this very next lesson, we will take a look at how you can alter the play back options of these actions to better suit your workflow.