Photoshop Actions make what used to be tedious easy by creating a small script file that Photoshop runs. Some Actions are literally hundreds of individual tasks that could take hours to walk through to create the desired effect. Instead, you load an Action, select your layer, and press Play. 

Here are a few Actions that we found useful for common and not-so-common effects that we tend to use on a regular basis.

http://phong.com/tutorials/actions/phong.atn
This is actually a series of Actions that can be assigned to hot-keys. These are your image resize, crop, and the like. They are ten in total and are assigned to your Function keys (F1-F10). These are big time savers even over the built in Photoshop hot-keys.

Star Filter
http://www.atncentral.com/zip/star_filter.zip

 
The Rubik’s Cube Effect
http://www.panosfx.com/images/stories/FreeFX/Rubik_s_cube/PanosFX_RubiksCube1.zip

 
Grungy and tweakable
http://www.atncentral.com/zip/UrbanAcid.zip

 

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