For those of us not that familiar with Photoshop CS and just sit in envy at our screens when we see a WOW Photo Manipulation and just wished we could create that.

Well I have sat in the same chair and there is an easier way and you too can also impress your friends with exactly the same results, if your a photographer and need that extra special effect on your photo’s wihout the extra time this will help.

So this is more of an article introduction guide than a tutorial and one I sincerely hope new users to Photoshop will gain something from.

A Photoshop Action can be quite daunting to a new user as well as the not so new so firstly let me briefly explain what a Photoshop Action is.

An action is a series of commands that you play back on a single file or a batch of files. If you tend to do the same effect over and over an action can come in very handy and save a lot of time, photographers favorite function or is one of mine.

I’d like to introduce you to PanosFX http://www.panosfx.com/

Its my little secret  as I don’t think too many know about this great free resource available and well what can I say this guys stuff simply rocks my socks.  He has Actions for purchase as well I went all through his site and I don’t think there was anything I came across I did not like.

So lets see what I found and get started.

Firstly the website is very inviting so you know straight away your going to love the site.

All of the Actions are compatible with:
Windows and Mac OS.

You will need:
Photoshop 6 and higher, they do tend to work better with Photoshop CS2
WinZip or any other extracting application that handles .zip files.

I’m going to show how simple these are to use and get an instant creative effect in a few minutes with no hard work.

Firstly create a new file and rename it to Actions, you can leave this on your desktop whilst following this and move it to a more appropriate place later, I like to keep mine handy.

Go to http://www.panosfx.com/ you’ll need to create a user account if you want to get into the Club Room as theres more neat stuff in there, that takes a few seconds, after your account is validated pop over here: http://www.panosfx.com/index.php?option=co…d=123&Itemid=27 and download The Deck, unzip it to your Actions Folder.

Open up Photoshop and then open an image or photo you’d like to work on preferably one that’s not to large, I’m using an image of my dog 500×375

Press Ctrl and F9 at the same time to bring up your Actions Screen.

Click on the small arrow top right of the actions pallette as so:

Scroll to where it says Load Actions and browse the Actions Folder for the action you wish to load.

After its loaded simply click the play button and follow the on screen instructions.

I did tell you its that simple and end results are:

Another few quick examples from different actions from PanosFX:

Save hours of work and following tutorials when you can create the exact same effects, all of the effects in the first photo were done using PanosFX, I hope this has helped someone and you too enjoy PanosFX as I have.