Thursday, March 19, 2009

Installing Actions in Photoshop Elements 6 for Mac

First, make sure you're putting the action in the right place.

ATN and PNG files go here:
Macintosh HD>Library>Application Support>Adobe>Photoshop Elements>6.0>Photo Creations>photo effects

(NOT in Your username>Library>Application Support... etc.)

XML Files go here:
Macintosh HD>Library>Application Support>Adobe>Photoshop Elements>6.0>Locale>en_Us>Photo Creations Metadata>Photo Effects

For the XML File:
Open any xml file in the folder by choosing open with>text edit. Before you change anything, do file, save as: Your Action Name.xml in that same folder.
Then, find this line:
name id="Name" value="Whatever Action You Opened" localize="true"/
and change the bolded part to the name you want to call the action you're installng.

Then, if you want to put your installed actions in their own category, you'd find this line:
typecategory id="TypeCat" value="Category of action you opened" localize="true"
and change the bolded part to the category you want. For example, I have all the actions I've installed from CoffeeShop actions in a folder called Coffee Shop Effects.

Save that xml.

Now, go back to:
Macintosh HD>Library>Application Support>Adobe>Photoshop Elements>6.0>Locale>en_Us

Rename MediaDatabase.db3 to MediaDatabase.old

Open PSE. It will take awhile to load because it is re-doing the media database. When it opens, you should open your actions panel. If you put the action in its own folder (in teh XML file editing step), you should see that folder name in the drop down menu. If not, you should see it in the all actions category.

When everything's working right, go back and delete mediadatabase.old in the Macintosh HD>Library>Application Support>Adobe>Photoshop Elements>6.0>Locale>en_Us folder.

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Also, be sure to check out my tutorial on installing layer styles, which can be found at this link!!

15 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks - great instructions that even I could follow!

Alan

Susan... said...

Hi Grace - THANK you for your tutorial here - made things so much easier for me!

One note though...in your instructions you say:

Microsoft HD>Library>Application Support>Adobe>Photoshop Elements>6.0>Photo Creations>photo effects

I'm pretty sure what you meant to say (mainly because this is how I did it...) is

MACINTOSH HD>Library>Application etc.

Slip of the finger - because unfortunately we live in a Microsoft dominated world (dang it all to heck!).

But I figured it out and THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU...my actions are working beautifully tonight!

:)

Grace said...

Susan, thanks for the heads up! What a horrible faux pas for a mac lover like me. :) I'm so glad I could help!!

THE SHILL'S said...

grace im just starting into photography, a fellow photog sent me some of her actions and i would like to use them. i have a mac with PSE 6 and followed the steps for the atn actions but can't get them to show up in the photo effects box to use? can you help? thx
camie

Angie said...

Hi Grace I am trying to put actions from coffeeshop in my PSE6. The first one I did worked but now I can't get any of the rest to work and I followed the downloadable instructions on there website. It didn't say anything about XML's and I'm feeling a bit retarded cause I can't figure out where to find the xml to follow our instructions...I'm lame I know = ) Any help with that would be awesome!!! Thanks = )

Angie

Angie said...

Oh my goodess!! I think I figured it out = ) Oh my goodness I'm so stinkin excited = ) THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!!

Anonymous said...

Thank you very much for these terrific instructions!

leslie b. said...

O.k. total newbie to actions. All the actions I downloaded from coffeeshop came with a .atn and .png but no .xml. There were also a .jpg and a .psd; what am I supposed to do with those? And what if I don't have the .xml files -- will they still work?? Thanks!

Janet said...

Over a year after your post and it is still helpful. Thank you for making it so clear! Janet

Anonymous said...

Your instructions were simple & to the point! They were awesome. Thanks for posting them!

kellie honey said...

thank you. very very helpful!

Brittany said...

These were very helpful! How do I keep all of my .atn/.png photo actions in one spot, rather than spattered around PSE's actions?

Lauren Wayne said...

Thank you so much! I was trying to follow another tutorial, and it wasn't matching what I was seeing. Yours was so clear and made me realize where I'd gotten off. I'm having fun with actions now for the first time! :)

Carrie said...

Thank you sooooooo much. This was beyond helpful; I've been confused for a while and this is awesomely easy.

Unknown said...

Installing an action was great, but I couldn't get the organization of categories to work. I followed the XML text edit code and all of the instructions to a T, but it just didn't work. Any suggestions on what might have fudged things? THANKS AND AWESOME BLOG!!!!!!!