Reimagined Actions in Photoshop

The actions panel hasn’t been changed in years, but now there’s a big update that promises to make it easier than ever to edit your pictures.

Many of us use actions for production work, or even some creative tasks. It’s a way to record a series of moves in Photoshop and then play them back on different images. You can share these action with others if you like. (get free Photoshop actions here)

This new feature is currently only in Photoshop beta. Its a WIP and Adobe says there are more features coming!

Click on the action panel Window>Actions

Notice the different look.

At the top, you’ll see Suggested actions. Photoshop analyzes the image and provides 5 suggested actions that might work well on this image. You can refresh the suggestions for a total of 15 suggestions.

What’s really interesting, as you roll over the actions, you will see a preview on your image. If you look at the Layers Panel, you get a clue how these previews are generated. Photoshop actually runs the action on the image as you can see in the layers panel.

As you roll over different actions, the image will revert and show previews of each action and not actually apply it.
To apply the action, simply click on its name in the actions panel.

If you click on “yours” you can see the currently installed actions in Photoshop, including your own custom actions. (This view is in Button Mode, from the fly-out menu).

Back to the suggested actions, you can also see Features essentials underneath.

This actions panel comes with a number of Adobe created actions included.

You can enter a search word to see what actions are available for your current needs.

As you see, I used Color as a search term and got these actions.

There isn’t a current way to list all the actions, but there is a hack.

If you enter the Spacebar (Thank’s Pete Green) It will show a list of all actions with a space in the name (Which is most of them).

If you choose Classic actions from the Fly out menu it will revert to the current actions panel.

Here is the familiar actions. Choose Actions from the menu to go back to the new enhanced actions panel.

Have fun with this!

Here are more resources on the latest Photoshop and Lightroom UPDATE.

7 Favorite new features in Photoshop 2025 April update

Auto Landscape Masks

Adjust Colors

Reflections Removal

Auto Selections | Auto selections on difficult images

Select details

Great to see you here at the CAFE

Colin

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