It's fairly easy to record your own action. To start off, go to the actions palette now click on the folder icon. This will create your own set. Give it a name in the pop up window. Now you can press the New Action icon. Enter a name for your new action...

Go ahead and select the rectangular marquee tool. Just click and drag to form a rectangular selection. Here I'm generally covering the area of this window. When you are the default marquee tool; new selection, you can move the marquee itself around the entire document...

The healing brush is just an incredible tool in Photoshop 7 & CS. This tool alone is often worth the price of the software if you're a professional photographer or retoucher...

If you're working on the same image and created a snapshot, go back to the original as shown and then you can continue working from scratch. The patch tool is similar to the Healing brush and is located underneath it in their toolbar menu...

The magic eraser tool can be a nice and quick tool to use in the right circumstances. Start out with a clean background image. This tutorial will help you to better understand it. I recommend that you duplicate the background layer first, by dragging it to the new layer icon...

To take the magic wand tool a little further and getting a more complicated selection check this tutorial out. If you have an image with frizzy hair this can cause difficulties. You can use the magic eraser to get rid of a simple background...

There are plenty of filters that come with Photoshop naturally. In the Photoshop CS (8) there is now a filter gallery. This larger-than-life dialog box allows you to use filters a little bit like layers. This is covered in depth on the Discover Photoshop: CS Features CD...

Editor's Pick in Photoshop Tutorials, May 2005
Ever seen icons that look like transparent plastic? Want to make some of your own? With this tutorial you’ll learn how it’s done.

You can use the blur tool to...you guessed it...BLUR. It's a great tool to soften pixels up. As with several other tools, you can change the size of the blur brush and even choose a hardness setting...

The sharpen tool isn't all that effective but you should be aware of it. With it you can sharpen pixels within the area of the brush that you use (sound familiar?). Once again you'll have brush palette options so you can choose the size of the sharpen brush...