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 recently experienced the joy of using Batch Processing. I'm a dedicated designer and love what I do however I wasn't going to spend hours manipulating the Hue/Saturation for every single image for my forum when I had much better things to do. What I found was the great tool of Batch Processing.
When you create an action you need it to do one thing, whatever that "thing" may be. In my case, I needed to change the Hue/Saturation for 80+ images from aqua to my "trademark" teal. You may need to create an action for a different purpose; however for now lets all agree we are going to change the Hue/Saturation. Now, to follow along you'll need something to work on. Grab a small image, like an icon.
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.)
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.
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, 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.
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 you can sit back and watch your images color themselves because you're using Actions and Batch Processing to do your tedious work.
I recently experienced the joy of using Batch Processing. I'm a dedicated designer and love what I do however I wasn't going to spend hours manipulating the Hue/Saturation for every single image for my forum when I had much better things to do. What I found was the great tool of Batch Processing.
When you create an action you need it to do one thing, whatever that "thing" may be. In my case, I needed to change the Hue/Saturation for 80+ images from aqua to my "trademark" teal. You may need to create an action for a different purpose; however for now lets all agree we are going to change the Hue/Saturation. Now, to follow along you'll need something to work on. Grab a small image, like an icon.
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.)
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.
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, 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.
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 you can sit back and watch your images color themselves because you're using Actions and Batch Processing to do your tedious work.
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