Ben Long at completedigitalphotography.com has released a small but important upgrade to the Photoshop Action Pack, a collection of 73 actions which let you automate Photoshop CS or CS2 using Apple's Automator. The new version provides full support for Intel-based Macs (in version 2, roughly a dozen actions wouldn't work or would crash when running on Intel Macs), as well as two new actions and several bug fixes and feature additions.

Automator, built-in to Mac OS X 10.4 ("Tiger") lets you create automation procedures by stringing together simple actions into "workflows." These workflows can be triggered and controlled in many different ways. While Photoshop provides its own Actions mechanism and batch processor, the Photoshop Action Pack provides a few features that Photoshop's built-in facility doesn't have. First, it gives you simple logic operations that let you build workflows that operate differently depending on the properties of your images. Second, because Automator can control other applications, you can build workflows that span multiple programs.

The Photoshop Action Pack version 2.2 can be downloaded for free from http://www.completedigitalphotography.com/?p=339. Independent lab testing has shown that you'll feel much better using the Action Pack if you make a Paypal donation while visiting the page (or at any point thereafter, for that matter).