George’s Wonder Blog

THE WHAT: Say you have a bunch of images or graphics on which you’d like to perform the same actions. Maybe you want to convert your images to grayscale, then make them all 100 pixels wide (or whatever). In “The Simple How” below I’ll go over the basic way to do this. For more advanced information than presented below search Google, go to your Photoshop documentation, or try the Adobe website.

THE SIMPLE HOW:

1. Preparation: First get all of the images/graphics you want to work with into one folder. Then make a copy of that folder in case things don’t turn out the way you expected.

2. Record the Action: In Photoshop make sure your Actions Palette is open. If you don’t see it go to the menu and click Window > Actions, or press Alt+F9.

Next, open one of the images in the folder you created in step 1 above.

On the actions palette click the round button with the black arrow (see figure 1), and from the menu select New Action (see figure 2). and in the New Action window, give the action a name, then click the Record button (see figure 3). Now go to work on your image, performing all of the actions you want applied to all of your images. When you are done click the Stop button on the Action Palette (see figure 1 or 3, its a square button as it would be on a VCR/DVD).

FIGURE 1

FIGURE 2

FIGURE 3

3. Run the Automated Batch: Now you can close the image you used to record your actions without saving (as you may reapply actions to the same image again). Go to the menu and click File > Automate > Batch. From the Action dropdown menu, select the action you saved (it may already be selected). Make sure the Source dropdown menu has Folder selected, then click the Choose button below, and navigate to your folder. Once you’ve clicked on the folder, then you can the OK button. Now you will see your images being processed. When the automated process is done simply go back and save your images and you are done. You can automate this portion, but that’s not covered here.

Happy batching!