TUTORIAL: Photoshop Batch Edit

Photoshop has a a convenient tool that allows users to effortlessly compress, resize, and/or perform Actions on a multitude of photos with the click of just a few buttons. This is sometimes known as Batch Editing.

1. Open Photoshop
2. File -> Scripts -> Image Processor
3. The Image Processor window will open up.
4. Select the folder where the images you want to process are located by clicking Select Folder.
5. Select the folder where you would like your processed images to be saved by clicking Select Folder. (This creates a new copy of of your images so your orginals are not altered).
6. Select whether you would like the images saved as a JPEG, PSD, or TIFF file. For each of the file formats, you may select a quality value (0-12, with 12 being the highest quality), as well as height and width of the images. If you want, you may save the images in multiple file types by checking the appropriate boxes.
7. In the Preferences section, if you want to run an Action, you may click the Run Action box and select the appropriate Action. If all you want to do is compress/resize, be sure the Run Action box is unchecked.
8. Click the Run button on the top right side of the Image Processor window.

FREEBIES: Photoshop Actions

In my daily effort to become more knowledgable about Photoshop CS3, I have been researching Photoshop Actions. Actions are a series of tasks that you play back on a single file or batch of files - it is a quick an easy way to "replay" a group of tasks to effortlessly effect the changes on files all at once.

Due to my obsession with freebies, I have been looking for free actions to download. Some of the favorites I have found include Lomo, Out of Bounds, and Polaroid (compliments of Addicted to Design.) and of course, Smooth Skin (compliments of Turning Turnip)!..but my search has just begun. There are so many generous people out there willing to disseminate their Actions for our use! Here is my not so exclusive list, as of this evening:

Action Central
Turning Turnip
PanosFX
Addicted to Design
FinesseFX

If you are unfamiliar with Actions, I found a pretty good tutorial. I typically prefer written tutorials to videos so I can more easily follow it step-by-step. This one written by Ms. Bradley is pretty comprehensive and easy to understand: Complete Guide to Using Actions in Photoshop

Another really great Photoshop resource I found was the Photoshop Exchange. While there doesn't appear to be much on the Exchange main page, you can find pages and pages of items by clicking on the "Browse by Category" section in the right pane of the page. For example, the Photoshop Exchange Actions section has more than 5000 pages. Along with Actions, they also have free Brushes, Filters, Plug-Ins, Scripts, Templates, Tutorials and more!