Palette Actions is one of the greates things in Photoshop. Any Photoshop user can record his / her operations for later use and save them as a standard file with ATN extension. Actions allow us:
- Get rid of recurring stale operations; for example you can automate resizing and adjusting your photos for web gallery.
- Use someone else's tricks and effects or share your skills with others
- Customize Photoshop by creating shortcuts for the most used commands.
- Etc.

Let's learn how to play and manage existing actions:
1. Open babylon.jpg.
2. Go to Actions palette.
3. Expand Default Actions.atn set (click on arrow). List of Adobe's sample actions appears.
4. Select Wood Frame - 50 pixel action and press playback button in the bottom of palette. There will be an "Image size must be..." message; click Continue.
5. Open palette's menu and choose Button Mode (animation below). In this mode actions aren't editable but are easier to play.
6. Open palette's menu again. There is a short list of sample actions in the bottom of menu. Choose Image Effects.atn. Loaded actions appear under default ones.
7. Click on Neon Nights button. Cool?

On the Web you can find thousands of ready actions. I recorded some educational ones (especially for this tutorial). Do test them right now.
1. Click here to download ETP.zip
2. Unzip the file.
3. Run Photoshop.