Adobe Photoshop is something of a giant - has any other software been so ubiquitous and dominant in its market as to become a widely-used verb? Although Adobe have made attempts to discourage its use, photoshopping - altering or improving a picture digitally - has come to be understood the world over, because the application itself is understood the world over. But it's also a giant in a more tangible sense: the scope of the program, the range of tools and options and techniques and variables and every means it offers for you to work on your images, is enormous. Delving into Photoshop can be a daunting experience, a deluge of menus, tools, effects and adjustable sliders and graphs.

Yet it's important not to be overwhelmed. All these different choices and methods are there to ensure that you can do anything, anything at all to your images, to give you complete control over their appearance. Photoshop is a tremendously powerful application, and that power can be very useful in maintaining an impressive visual impact for your business. However, if you've not a great deal of expertise with Photoshop, how can you bridge the gap between that inexperience and utilising all that the software can offer?

Actions

All the image editing tools that Photoshop provides revolve around a rather less complicated principle. Digital images are, essentially, very simple things. They're really nothing more than a neatly ordered array of small dots of colour - pixels - with no one dot containing anything other than a single colour.

All Photoshop is doing is changing certain the properties of the pixels in particular ways, so that you don't have to adjust them one at a time (which, it has to be said, is rather handy - many digital cameras today produce pictures comprising more than twelve million individual pixels); each tool or adjustment changes groups of pixels together in a uniform fashion, so that there's a visible impact on the whole picture. If a few different adjustments are made together, this will result in a consistent style that can be applied to any picture.

Those multiple adjustments (say, for example, increase the contrast, decrease the saturation, and blur the picture a little, all together) are known as 'actions'. If you run the same action on ten different pictures, they'll all be adjusted in just the same way - an automated process, rather like a washing machine cycle that runs through preset stages of washing, rinsing, spinning and draining regardless of what items are put into the drum.

There are two very important things to understand about actions: firstly, that they are very simple to create (which I'll come to shortly); and secondly, that it's every bit as easy to download actions from the internet - they frequently come with illustrations showing exactly what they do, so you know what you're getting in advance - and install them into your own copy of Photoshop. All you then need to do is to open an image, select your action from a list, and press the 'play' button in the Actions window.

Saving time

Of course, you may already know what you want to do to your pictures, you may be familiar with what commands produce the effect that you're looking for. In that case, you can create your own actions. There's no complex coding skills needed, no further expertise to pick up; the Actions window also has 'record' and 'stop' buttons. If you select record before you run through those commands (and hit stop afterwards), Photoshop creates an action for you which you can then use on any image. As with the downloaded actions, you can select yours from the list and push play to run those commands instantly - saving you a great deal of time in the process.

And it's the time you'll save that makes it so beneficial to get to grips with Photoshop actions. A short training course in using the software can help you to get up to speed with this and many other techniques that both improve your images and save you time. Given that visual impact is so important for any business, and that time is money, it's surely worth taking advantage of a tool that can help you with both.