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 only just discovered the wonder of Batch Processing. I'm dedicated and detail oriented, but sitting in front of the computer adjusting the Hue/Saturation for the countless number of photos taken at my son's first birthday was simply out of the question. I did find a more than happy solution in 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.
Now go to Window - Actions and make sure it is checked. If it is, you should see a tab in the Layers Palette labeled, of course, 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.
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, 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.
You should see a naked grey image and so we need to add some color. Make sure your action is still recording and go to Image - Adjustments - Hue/Saturation. It helps to have the settings for color saved in a .ahu (Hue/Saturation) file so all you have to do is click Load and select Teal.ahu. If you don't have a file saved you can simply use the sliders.
Our final step is to save it for the web. Make sure your action still recording and go to File - Save For the Web and set your file type and optimization settings. I use the standard GIF settings. Select your destination directory and save.
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.
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 you can sit back and watch your images color themselves because you're using Actions and Batch Processing to do your tedious work. - 16738
I only just discovered the wonder of Batch Processing. I'm dedicated and detail oriented, but sitting in front of the computer adjusting the Hue/Saturation for the countless number of photos taken at my son's first birthday was simply out of the question. I did find a more than happy solution in 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.
Now go to Window - Actions and make sure it is checked. If it is, you should see a tab in the Layers Palette labeled, of course, 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.
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, 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.
You should see a naked grey image and so we need to add some color. Make sure your action is still recording and go to Image - Adjustments - Hue/Saturation. It helps to have the settings for color saved in a .ahu (Hue/Saturation) file so all you have to do is click Load and select Teal.ahu. If you don't have a file saved you can simply use the sliders.
Our final step is to save it for the web. Make sure your action still recording and go to File - Save For the Web and set your file type and optimization settings. I use the standard GIF settings. Select your destination directory and save.
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.
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 you can sit back and watch your images color themselves because you're using Actions and Batch Processing to do your tedious work. - 16738
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