Learn Photoshop Batch Processing Revealed

By David Peters

If you are not quite familiar with Photoshop, this program has these wonderful little features called Actions. These Actions have many different uses from creating remarkable effects to maximizing your productivity and of course they can always be counted on to handle the common and tiresome tasks that are nothing more than time consuming.

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 creating an action, you need it to produce the same one result. Let's imagine an example of changing the Hue/Saturation in 100+ photos from bright red to a rose tone. You might need an action to serve another purpose, but let's stick to this Hue/Saturation idea for this tutorial. Now pick a small image such as an icon and we'll continue.

Next go to Windows - Actions, making sure it is checked. If checked, you should see a tab in the Layers Palette appropriately 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.)

Go back to the Actions menu and select "New Action." I'll give you three guesses as to what this does. Now, before recording an action you need to figure out the steps you'll need to take and the order in which you'll need to take them. Since this is a pretty simple action you can do this is your sleep eventually.

Next comes recording. Begin by clicking on the little circle icon in between the square and the triangle at the bottom of the palette. Once that is selected everything you do in Photoshop will be recorded until the end of action. If you do the wrong step no worries, simply stop the action by clicking the square icon and return to your last step.

For this tutorial, the first thing to do is change the Mode of the image to RGB, since .gif files are saved in Index mode which don't respond well to colorization. Go to Image - Mode - RGB with the Action recording.

Next, we need to remove the image of it's current color to make adding our own color easier to apply, so go 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:

Woo, we've now SunBlinded the icon! All that's left to do now is save it for the web. Is your action still recording? Good. Go to File - Save For The Web and set your file type and optimization settings. I use the standard GIF settings, but whatever floats your boat, dude. Select your destination directory and save. If your Actions palette looks like this:

Stop recording and say "Yay, I made an action!" because you're finished. Now to put your newly born action into... ahem... action, we'll do a Batch Process. What this will do is take all the images in a specified directory and apply whatever changes were recorded in the action. Just for the sake of the tutorial, create a directory and drop some images into it, or just duplicate one that you already have.

To begin the process go to File - Automate - Batch and make sure the name of the Action Set you just recorded 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 either 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. Once you have everything configured to your liking, click OK.

The hard part of the job is now done for you! All that is left is to relax and watch your pictures color themselves thanks to Actions and Batch Processing.

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