She tried again. New error: “Could not complete because of a program error.”
Photoshop whirred. Then, a red pop-up of doom: “The command ‘Select’ is not currently available.”
She froze. Curves. Why would Curves fail?
Maya stared at the screen, her reflection a pale ghost in the darkness of her studio. The deadline was in six hours. The client wanted thirty product shots retouched, color-corrected, and resized. Normally, that was a two-coffee job. Let the Action run, lean back, watch the magic. photoshop actions not working
Her stomach dropped. She realized the truth. The action wasn't broken. She had broken it six months ago.
It should work. It had worked yesterday on the test images.
The watch blurred. The curves adjusted. The gloss appeared. She tried again
She opened the Action. Clicked the offending step—the “Select Layer” command. In the dropdown, she changed the specific name “Layer 0” to the wildcard:
She looked at the Layers panel. The watch was on a locked Background layer. Her action was programmed to create an adjustment layer above the active layer. But the action was also trying to apply a mask based on a selection that… no longer existed the moment the adjustment layer appeared.
She saved the action. Took a breath. Clicked Curves
The fix was stupidly simple.
She clicked on her lovingly crafted action, “Pro_Gloss_V3.”
The cursor blinked, smug and indifferent. Panic began its slow crawl up her spine. She opened the Action panel, peering into the code of her own creation: Make Layer > Select Color Range > Curves > Gaussian Blur.