Photoshop – Batch Processing
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 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 expand the Actions menu and choose “new set.” This creates a folder for the action you create (you don’t necessarily need the folder, it simply helps 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.
All right, here’s the fun part: Recording. See that little circle icon in between the square and the triangle at the bottom of the palette? Push it. Now everything you do in Photoshop will be recorded until the end of action. Don’t worry, if you screw up, just stop the action by clicking the square icon and go back 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.
There will be a naked grey image left to which we need to add some color. While still recording your action, go to Image – Adjustments – Hue/Saturation. I keep the rose color settings saved in a .ahu (Hue/Saturation) file already so all I have to do is press Load and select Rose.ahu, but you can achieve this color by using the sliders.
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.
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.
Now you can sit back and watch your images color themselves because you’re using Actions and Batch Processing to do your tedious work.