Photoshop Batch Processing

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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 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.

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.)

Now go back to the Actions menu and choose “New Action.” Have an idea of the steps you’ll need to take and their order before recording an action. Since this is a fairly simple action, you will master this in no time at all.

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’ll have to strip the image of it’s current color to make adding our (my) 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.

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.

Now you can press the square button on the actions tab and stop recording. To put your newly created action into action, we’ll need to do a Batch Process. A batch process will take all the images in a specified directory and apply whatever changes were recorded in the action.

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.