Actions

[Roleen]

I'm curious. I've been searching the web for hours without luck or any clear answer. 

When creating photoshop actions, how do I know/test if it will work on all photoshop versions? Do I have to own all the versions and manually test them? If so, can I somehow still purchase them? Or are there resource sites I can visit displaying the differences in versions?

[Damien Symonds]

Gosh, that's a great question!

I assume that people who do it professionally DO own a lot of versions.

You wouldn't need every version, but you'd certainly want one older one.  Eg if you had CS2, and you knew it worked on that, then you could safely say it worked on every version between CS2 and the current version.

[Roleen]

Ah! That makes sense. Thank you so much!! 

[Damien Symonds]

Elements is  the far more complicating factor.  It's pretty rare for actions not to work on older versions of Photoshop ... but it's very common for actions not to work in Elements.  So you'll definitely need at least one version of that, if you intend to do this seriously.

[Roleen]

Oh... Thank you so much for the advice. I actually assumed Elements would be the less complicated program to work with. 

[Damien Symonds]

No, because you can't make actions in Elements, you have to make them in Photoshop.  But Elements has fewer functions than Photoshop, so you have to be careful to only use functions that Elements has.

[Roleen]

I didn't know that. Have only ever used Photoshop before. Thank you for clearing that up. ?