Batch Processing with Photoshop
For those of you who don’t already know, Photoshop has these nifty little features called Actions. Now, these actions can be used for many things, including the creation of beautiful and eye catching effects, maximizing your productivity, or simply to carry out the tedious and mundane tasks that you just doesn’t feel like doing.
I recently experienced the joy of using Batch Processing. I’m a dedicated designer and love what I do however I wasn’t going to spend hours manipulating the Hue/Saturation for every single image for my forum when I had much better things to do. What I found was the great tool of Batch Processing.
When you create an action you need it to do one thing, whatever that “thing” may be. In my case, I needed to change the Hue/Saturation for 80+ images from aqua to my “trademark” teal. You may need to create an action for a different purpose; however for now lets all agree we are going to change the Hue/Saturation. Now, to follow along you’ll need something to work on. Grab a small image, like an icon.
Now go to Window > Actions and make sure it that it is checked. If it is, you should see a tab in the Layers Palette labeled Actions.
Click on the arrow button to enter the Actions menu and then “new Set.” This will create a folder for your newly created action (the folder is not mandatory, but it does help with organization.)
Return to the Actions menu and choose “New Action.” Before you begin to record an action you need to decide the steps you’ll need to take and the order in which you’ll need to take them. This is a pretty simple action and soon you will be able to do this is your sleep.
Now for the recording part. There will be a small circle icon between the square and the triangle at the bottom of the palette that you will need to click. Now Photoshop will record everything you do until the end of the Action. If you have an error, simply stop the Action by pushing the square icon and go back to your last step taken.
For our action, the first thing we need to do is change the Mode of the image to RGB, since .gif files are saved in Index mode which don’t take too kindly to colorization. So with the action recording, go to Image > Mode > RGB.
Next, strip the image of the current color in order to apply our own color easier by going to Image > Adjustment > Desaturate.
Now that we have a naked grey image, we need to add some color. Make sure your action is still recording and go to Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation. I have the settings for my teal color saved in a .ahu (Hue/Saturation) file already so all I have to do is click Load and select Teal.ahu, but since you don’t have that you’ll have to use the sliders. Use these settings for my color:
Finally, we save it for the web. Check that your action is still recording and go to File > Save For the Web and set your file type and optimization settings. I use the customary GIF settings. Choose the destination directory and save.
You can now stop recording because your Action is complete. Now we will perform a Batch Process to put your Action into effect. This will take all the images in a specified directory and incorporate the changes recorded in the Action.
Begin by going to File > Automate > Batch and make sure the name of the Action Set you just made is in the first dropdown list and the name of the Action is in the second. Set the third dropdown box (next to Source) to Folder and use the Choose button to find your duplicated or created folder of images. For destination, you can leave it set to it’s default “None” to have the action applied and saved in the source folder, or save the “actionized” images into a separate folder. Click OK once you have everything set to your liking..
Now sit back and watch your images color themselves because you’re using Actions and Batch Processing to do your dirty work
Last 5 posts by David Peters
- Which Should You Choose Photoshop CS4 Or Photoshop CS64? - November 20th, 2008
- How You Can Use Photoshop to Make Your Photos Look Great - November 14th, 2008
- How to Use Photoshop to Restore Old Photos - November 7th, 2008
- Turning Your Photographs into a Work of Art - November 7th, 2008
- Share your Photos - November 6th, 2008
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