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 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 that it is checked. If it is, you should see a tab in the Layers Palette labeled 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.)
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 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, 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.
You can now stop recording because your Action is complete. Now we will perform a Batch Process to put your Action into effect. This will take all the images in a specified directory and incorporate the changes recorded in the Action.
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.
Now sit back and watch your images color themselves because you're using Actions and Batch Processing to do your dirty work - 15437
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 that it is checked. If it is, you should see a tab in the Layers Palette labeled 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.)
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 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, 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.
You can now stop recording because your Action is complete. Now we will perform a Batch Process to put your Action into effect. This will take all the images in a specified directory and incorporate the changes recorded in the Action.
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.
Now sit back and watch your images color themselves because you're using Actions and Batch Processing to do your dirty work - 15437
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