Category: Photography Tutorials

Knowing how to automate changes to multiple images in Photoshop is essential. Cropping, or white-balance correcting a folder full of images one-by-one is tedious and unnecessary. This photography tutorial will go through Photoshop Actions, and the Automate-Batch feature to automate the same operations for an infinite number of images. Tutorials on Photstoric.

Step 1: Make a Working Copy

Open the folder that contains the files to edit. Create a copy of one of the files in the folder. This file will be your dummy or maquette for making changes.

Step 2: Create an Action

Select Window – Actions. Then click the Create New Action button. Actions are saved series of Photoshop operations so that common or complex steps can be accessed later or used for automated tasks.

Step 3: Name Action

Enter a descriptive name for the action.

Step 4: Record Action

After creating a new action, the red record button will now be active. Every operation made will be recorded in the action. In this tutorial, the image has been resized to 700 pixels wide and the image has been toned. Any combination of operations and effects can be applied.

Step 5: Flatten Layers

After every operation has been completed, flatten all the layers so that the image will save as a jpeg. If you started with psd file and you want to keep the layers, don’t flatted them.

Step 6: Save & Close the Image

Saving the image while still recording the action will allow Photoshop to quickly run through each image in the Batch without a save dialog box popping up for each image. Also, close the image while still recording for the same reason.

Step 7: Stop Recording Action

Stop recording the action by clicking the square stop button. No further operations will be saved and the action will be complete. If an operation was missed, delete any steps and begin recording where the mistake was made.

Step 8: Delete the Working Copy

Delete the working file copy that the action was preformed on in the folder of images.

Step 9: Open the Batch Automater

Under file, click Automate then Batch.

Step 10: Batch Automater Settings

Match the settings in the above images. Choose the action set and the specific action. The source is folder, and choose the folder with the images. Be careful that only the images you want changed are in the folder. If you’re worried, create a copy of the entire folder to run automater on.

Step 12: Run the Automator

Press OK and the automator will begin quickly running the action on every image in the folder.

Conclusion

Using Automate – Batch is the fastest way to make the same changes to multiple images in Photoshop. It is an enormously powerful tool, and will speed up any photographers work flow.

For other automate questions, please post on the Digital Editing Forum. Requests and suggestions are encouraged for future tutorial topics and should be submitted to the Requests topic.