If you find yourself doing the same tasks over and over in Photoshop and you haven't yet looked into actions and batch processing, you're missing out on a great way to automate large parts of your workflow and save lots of time. This great video will show you everything you need to know.
Coming to you from Nemanja Sekulic, this great video explains how actions and batch processing work, when they're useful, and why they'll make your workflow in Photoshop more efficient. In short, an action lets you record almost any sequence of tasks and automate them so you can recreate the entire sequence with one click, even allowing you to set parameters differently each time. For example, when I edit a portrait, I have about 15 different layers for different tasks, and rather than manually recreate all the same layers every single time I edit an image, I just click my associated action, and out pops my normal workspace. The great thing about actions is that you can also employ them when batch processing a set of photos, making it super easy to run complicated, multi-step procedures across entire photo sets. Check out the video above for more.
