Batch Processing with Adobe Photoshop
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 had the pleasure of a little thing called Batch Processing. I’m a dedicated designer, but there was no way I was going sit in front of my computer for hours changing the Hue/Saturation for every single image for my forum. What is Batch Processing, you say? Well, it’s something that processes a batch,and I’m going to show you how to do it.
When you’re creating an action you need it to do one thing: Something. In my case, I needed to change the Hue/Saturation for 75+ images from blue to my “trademark” teal. Maybe you need an action for a different purpose, but humor me and tell yourself, “Hey, I need to make my image the same color as hers!” Next, you’ll need something to work on. Get a small image, like an icon, preferably the one I’m using for this tutorial.
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.
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 my action, the first thing I 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. Now take a look at your Actions palette, it should look like this:
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:
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.
Go to File – Automate – Batch and make sure the name of the Action Set you just created 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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