Ever been frustrated because you've been struggling to understand how some complicated action works? The Actions Palette is almost completely hopeless for managing and reviewing actions, but here's a tip passed on to me by Mike Lepp who got it from Scott Kelby (). It's not a tip that made it into Scott's book, but useful nonetheless.

You can create a text file that contains all the commands, options and settings in the action. You must first ensure that you have selected and action; then holding down for Windows or for the Mac, open the Actions Palette menu and choose "save", and you'll be prompted to enter a file name. Unfortunately, it doesn't matter which action set you choose because all the currently loaded sets will be included in the output file. It would also be really, really cool, if you could edit the text file and reload it to create a modified action, but you can't.

Still, it's a useful aid to help keep track of what's happening in an action. Here's an example showing one of the actions from the supplied "defaults.atn":

Action: Sepia Toning (layer)
        Make snapshot
                From: Current History State
                Using: full document
        Make layer
        Merge Visible
                With Duplicate
        Desaturate
        Make
                New: adjustment layer
                With Clipping Mask
                Type: hue/saturation
                With Colorize
                Adjustment: hue/saturation adjustment list
                hue/saturation adjustment
                Hue: 30
                Saturation: 25
                Lightness: 0