Hello everybody, this is how I work when making photoshop actions.

Everybody teaches you the [recipe] but they never show you how their work area looks like.
This helps a lot when making photoshop actions because, you have all your tools there.

Let me explain you this.

1.- Navigator, I use this tool when I need to see the details more closely.

2.- Actions panel, even though I don't use it very often, (because I always make psd files instead), I left the panel open, so when I'm editing my photos and I like how the colors are turning out, I quickly start making actions.

3.- Brush panel, very useful, I rather have the brush panel open than going to the brush bar.

4.- Paragraph & Character panel, there's always something to type.

Now this is my very used area and the most important when making actions.

5.- Swatches and Color panels, right now I have the default colors there, but those colors are very useful, I pretty much know how the colors will turn out when changing the mode of the color fill layer.
Most people use the swatches when coloring artworks, well I use them to make actions, they are very well organized, in my opinion, diferent tones of the most simple and basic colors.

6.- Adjustments panel, YOU. NEED. THEM. THERE. OK?. when making psd is very useful to have that panel open but when making actions is not necessary, because, well at least for me, to be more professional, I need to name all the layers but, you don't really need to go everytime to layer-adjustments, just go to the layers panel and click on the adjustments icon, you have all the options there.

7.- Properties, with Photoshop CS6 you need this open, anyways if you don't want it to show up, it will appear when you add an adjusment layer, so if it will appear anyways, I re-organized my sidebar so the properties panel can fit.

8.- Layers, Channels & Paths panel. this panel is in the default version for a reason, YOU WILL ALWAYS NEED IT THERE.

9.- History Panel, I always resize my canvas, I don't really like working with big photos because the system of my computer starts working really slow at some point, so I pretty much resize the images to fit my screen size, about 1000x750px, I can work perfectly fine with those settings.
I'm a really hard person to please, so I'm always making snapshots, they are very useful when you need to compare works, or when you want to go backwards. It shows you all the movements you've made. The good thing is that you can always go back to the original image without having like 3 canvas with the same exact image.

10.- Pretty images, I love working with nature stock images always pick the photos that have good composition of elements and colors.

I hope you understand this and that this tutorial can help you out and have an idea on how I work.

♥ ~ Jae

Stock Image : [link]