Batch processing is a fantastic tool for doing the same thing to a large group of pictures.

This is a quick tutorial on how to do batch processing in Photoshop. This only touches on one aspect, but should give you an idea of what it does, and some simple directions on how to do it.

Scenario: GammaRai has just finished scanning in all of her BE art at a very high resolution. Far too big to post on her website without blowing her bandwidth quota and having it shut down. Normally, she resizes the pictures she scans in, but she’s been putting off scanning for a while, and has 50 new pictures she needs to resize.

Resizing them all by hand will take far too long. Fortunately, she’s sitting in front of a computer, which loves tasks like these. The first part will be creating the action she wants to automate:

1. Open a test picture. Gamma copies one of the pictures she wants to resize to the desktop. If there’s a problem, she doesn’t want to ruin the original picture.
2. Go to the top menu and select Window → Actions That will select the actions tab, right next to the history tab.
3. Hit the folder Icon at the bottom of that window. “Create new set” In this case, Gamma will name it “Gamma’s Actions”
4. Hit the post-it note icon at the bottom of that window “Create new action”. Gamma wants to reduce the picture to 75% of its original, so she names the action “Reduce 75%”.
5. The red light shows that Photoshop is now recording her actions. Gamma goes up to the top menu, Image → Image Size and reduces the picture to 75%.
6. She then goes back to the “Actions” box, and hits the “Stop Recording” button next to the red light.

And that’s it! The action has been recorded.

Now, to do use it on her 50 pictures:

1. Go to the top menu, File → Automate → Batch. The Batch window should come up.
2. She chooses “Gamma’s Actions” as the set. “Reduce 75%” as the action. For source, she chooses folder, then hits the “Choose” button and finds the folder with all the original scans in it.
3. For “Destination” she changes that to “Folder” and hits the “Choose” button. She doesn’t want the resized pictures to overwrite the originals, so he hits the “New” button, and creates a new folder she calls “Resized”.
4. She hits the “OK” button.

And that’s it! Gamma sits back and watches the computer having a great time opening up pictures, resizing them, saving them to the new folder, and then closing them. The computer is done in less than a minute. She goes to the resized folder and confirms that the picture are all there and resized.