If you plan to email an image to a friend or post the image in an online gallery or in a blog post, it's important to prepare and save your image for the web. To do that, we'll use an action.

I'll demonstrate on this image called smell-the-roses.psd, which you'll find in your Part 3 lesson nine practice folder. In the same folder, you'll see an action called Resize-For-Web.atn. You'll know it's an action because the file has a .atn ending. All Photoshop actions have a .atn ending.

Don't try to open the action by double clicking on it. Instead, open it from the Actions panel inside Photoshop Elements. I'll show you how to do that in just a moment. I've also included a preview image that gives you an idea of what this action does. It reduces the size of a document and helps you easily save it for the web. So let's try it out.

Open your image in Photoshop Elements. It can be a layered PSD image or a JPEG image. This happens to be a layered PSD. Click on the Actions panel tab to make it the active panel. If you don't see the Actions panel in the Menu Bar, choose Window, Actions. The Actions panel comes with some default actions. Each folder represents one set of actions. The folder is not the action, the actions are listed below the folder. Each action has a triangle next to it. So this top action set has three actions. If you click on the triangle to the left of an action, you'll see the steps that the action will take. This information is rarely of any importance to you because all the steps are done automatically without you having to know anything about it. That's the whole reason for actions.

So I'll click again to hide the steps. To open up some more space in the Actions panel, click on the triangle to the left of each folder to collapse the action set. And I'll do that with all the folders. To load additional third party actions click on the flyout menu in the upper right corner and choose Load Actions. Navigate to the Part 3 lesson nine practice folder I showed you earlier. To find the Resize For Web action, click on the action and then click Open. Or you can simply double click on the action and the action set will appear at the bottom of the list of current actions.

Click on the triangle to the left of the folder to see all the actions in the Resize For Web set, there are 10 actions. I originally created this action set for online gallery images, which often have size limitations. The average size currently is around seven or 800 pixels. So if that's why you're saving for web, you can choose an action for a square image, a vertical image or a horizontal image and you would also choose one of the three pixel sizes. But what if you want a different size, say for a specific blog post, then you would choose the Custom Size action that is set to stop so you can enter a custom size.

I'll use this action to demonstrate. Now very important, you must click on the name of the action to select it. Don't click on the folder or the folder name. That is simply the container for all the actions in that set. Notice that the action Play button is grayed out because the folder is not the action. Don't click on the triangle next to an action. That will open the action up so you can see the steps but it doesn't select it. Notice the Play button is still grayed out. You must click on the name of the action itself. Now it's selected and the play button is available to click.

Because I chose Custom Size the action stops to allow me to change the image size. Under Pixel Dimensions change either the width or the height, and I'll change the width to 650 and that changes the height proportionally. Click OK to continue the action.

The next step takes you to the Save for Web dialog box. The first time you use Save for Web you'll need to adjust your settings. After that they should remain sticky. Choose JPG for the file type. And also check Optimized. For quality enter 50. You'll rarely need a higher quality than 50, but you can always change the quality for any specific image. And that's really all you need to do. The two images on the left show the file size before: over 800 k, and the Save for Web file size around 47 k. A lot better for uploading to the web or for emailing. The image on the right also shows how the final image will look. To actually save the file click Save.

A navigation window will come up so you can navigate to the location where you want to save your file. I'll save mine to My Practice Files, add something to the name to indicate this is a web file. Let's add -web-650px. "px" stands for pixels. So I know the pixel width at a glance just by looking at the file name.

It's especially important to modify the name if you start with a JPG and use the action to save for web, because changing the file name means you won't overwrite the original JPEG. Click Save.

The final step of the action is to return your image to the state it was right before you started the action. It's the same size as before, and all the layers are intact when you close the image. If you did make some changes, you have the option to save them now, or you can close without saving to revert to the last saved version, which is what I'll do.

Keep in mind that actions are very easy to add and remove. From the Actions panel, simply select an action and click on the Trash icon to delete it. To return to the default actions, click on the icon in the upper right corner and choose Reset Actions. You can append the default actions to the end of the list, or click OK to replace all the current list of actions with the default set. But I'm going to click Cancel because I don't want to remove my Resize For Web action.

So that's how to load and use actions. Make it easy on yourself and use an action the next time you want to save your image in a good format to email or upload to the web.