Lather, Rinse and .... You Guessed It

We now need to automatically repeat this process several times. We will be inserting the resulting picture into the biggest screen of the picture itself. Photoshop is still recording our actions - lets turn off the recording process. Go to the "Actions" window, click on the square button at the bottom - its just like the "stop" button on your VCR/DVD/iPod. You can now actually see a list of all the actions you made under the title of "Automation". Your Actions window should look very much like this: To insert more and more TVs into the biggest one, press the triangle button, which means "play". The "Automation" tab should be highlighted. Press as many times as needed, watch what happens as all your actions are repeated. Here is the finished product - congratulations on a job well done!

Conclusion

There are many other different and very useful ways in which Photoshop's automation can be used. It is most powerful when you are applying certain actions to many different image files. Take a look at this tutorial by David Nagel: Batch Processing in Adobe Photoshop. As for more visual effects, you can achieve some interesting results by cutting a hole in an image, and putting a copy of it in the hole. For example: Briefly, the above effect has been achieved by cutting out the inside of the mouth, turning on action recording, copying, resizing and relocating the original image to fit under the new mouth, applying a semitransparent black color overlay, and repeating those recorded actions. Advanced: You may have noticed that the TV screens get progressively more slanted as they move deeper into the large screen. This is because the Free Transform, applied many times over, multiplies the skewing that we do to fit an image into a screen (the screen is skewed because of perspective). To eliminate this effect, you need to cut out the TV screen, and put successive TVs underneath the hole that is formed - just like the above mouth image. For more interesting ideas, as always, I recommend Pixel2Life.