I run actions all day long, in batch and individually. A two minute action *is* a long time, but let's clarify what's happening in the action. Maybe there's a different way to do it, or the order of the steps.

I can tell you that when I run actions that are not batched, it's the wierdest thing - I can press my hot key and boom, crop the right edge by 10 pixels in the blink of an eye. I press another hotkey and you see the status bar crawling along to recalculate the image before it lops off 10 pixels from the other side. So I know what you're saying.

I haven't tried it, and from what I've read it *shouldn't* help, but I have often wondered if enabling and/or increasing the image cache setting would speed it up. Here, I'm talking about Edit|Preferences|Memory and Image Cache.

Reading the helpfile about this doesn't seem like it would help. But the fact that Action 1 decreases the canvas size by 10 pixels on the right, in the blink of an eye, and Action 2 decreases the canvas size by 10 pixels on the LEFT, yet takes forever, makes me wonder if PS has to "recalculate" the image size in order to perform that second operation.

That's a long winded way to say, enabling the Image Cache or increasing the number of histogram levels may be worth trying, but it's just a guess at this point.

In terms of productivity, you may be better off re-thinking how you can perform *some* steps with actions manually, and then run other operations on them in batch. Let me briefly explain in case it may help...

We normally think very linearly - do these five steps in sequence to the images. Steps 1 and 2 require some user intervention or "artists eye", but the rest are pretty straighforward. You can batch images that have these types of steps by running steps 1 and 2 on them with manual actions, and then save them (as PSD's). Then you can run a batch action for steps 3 through 5 on them.

Maybe this isn't possible with the type of editing your doing, or maybe there aren't enough images to warrant a batch operation, but I offer it up for consideration.

Peace,
Tony

Jim_Wheeler

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actions that run slow