Video:Photoshop Tutorial: How to Batch Process

Transcript:Photoshop Tutorial: How to Batch Process

Hi! I'm Mark Zamora for About.com. In this video, I'll guide you through batch processing in Adobe Photoshop so that you can easily apply many changes to a large number of photos with ease! 

Use Photoshop Actions to Batch Process

The basic foundation to batch processing is in actions. In order to start working with actions, Choose "Window" and select the "Actions" option. This opens up a list with all Actions saved to Photoshop. As you can see, there are a few that come pre-installed like adding frames or changing the colors.

Custom Batch Processing

You can also create custom actions by pressing the New Action button here, naming your action, and then pressing the record button. Photoshop will watch what you do to your image, for example - I want to save this image as a JPEG, so when I go to Save As, Photoshop will record that and create an action that Saves images as JPGs. 

Applying the Batch Process Action

These can come in handy, but for the sake of showing you how to batch process your images, we'll be using the prebuilt. "Custom RGB to Grayscale" action. If you look next to this action, you’ll see this icon. When turning your images to grayscale, you often have to mess with a slider dialog box. For the sake of processing a lot of photos, removing this icon by clicking on it will skip the sliders and use the settings in the action - making this go a lot faster! 

Now we’re ready to batch process! Within Photoshop, select File then Automate and then Batch. You'll see this screen. First let's Set the Action we want to use. Leave this on Default Actions, but change this to Custom RGB to Grayscale, or whatever action you want to use. Next, choose your source images. If you have hundreds of photos saved to a folder, this is where you select that folder. 

Batch Processing Options

There are some options here. First: Override Open commands. When checked, this will only open images if there is an “Open” command recorded in the action. The same thing applies to Override Save As commands. Unless our action has a Save As command, leave this unchecked. So, in this case, the custom RGB to grayscale action does NOT have either an open or save command, so I will uncheck these both. Now choose where to save it. A new folder something like "Batch Process" with the date might be a good option.

Choose how to name your new files as well as what extension. When you're ready - press OK and let Photoshop do it's thing! Depending on how many photos you have, and what the action is doing,  it can still take a while but its much faster than doing it one by one and very useful! That's it!

Thanks for watching and be sure to check out compute.about.com for more tutorials and tips!