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 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'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.
Next go to Windows - Actions, making sure it is checked. If checked, you should see a tab in the Layers Palette appropriately 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 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.
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.
Woo, we've now SunBlinded the icon! All that's left to do now is save it for the web. Is your action still recording? Good. Go to File - Save For The Web and set your file type and optimization settings. I use the standard GIF settings, but whatever floats your boat, dude. Select your destination directory and save. If your Actions palette looks like this:
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.
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 sit back and watch your images color themselves because you're using Actions and Batch Processing to do your dirty work - 20785
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'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.
Next go to Windows - Actions, making sure it is checked. If checked, you should see a tab in the Layers Palette appropriately 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 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.
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.
Woo, we've now SunBlinded the icon! All that's left to do now is save it for the web. Is your action still recording? Good. Go to File - Save For The Web and set your file type and optimization settings. I use the standard GIF settings, but whatever floats your boat, dude. Select your destination directory and save. If your Actions palette looks like this:
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.
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 sit back and watch your images color themselves because you're using Actions and Batch Processing to do your dirty work - 20785
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