online photo tutorials

If you browse a Photoshop forum long enough, you’ll often come across a common problem. Someone’s taken a large amount of photos for the first time and opened them all in Photoshop. After a couple minutes of editing and resizing, they realize they have 60 pictures open, that they want saved to a specific folder. Looking through the “file” menu in Photoshop, they don’t see a “Save All…” command. What to do?

The solution to this problem is quite simple. It’s actually saved under the “File” menu under “Automate”, then “Batch”. The “Batch” command will run a script, then close the open image. It is not for usage if you want to, say, sharpen every open image, because it will sharpen them and then exit without saving. The “Batch” command is best used when you are finished editing and you want to save and exit, possibly with another action at the same time like “resize” or “sharpen”.

In order to save all the open images, we need to first create an “Action”, or an automated set of events. One of Photoshop’s best workflow management options is the “Action”, as they are simple to make and very powerful.

If you don’t have the action window open, hit “ALT + F9″.

Create a new folder called “Saving”. The name of the folder is unimportant, but it’s good to keep all the Actions related to saving the image together. Click on the “New Action” button, and create an action called “Save and Exit”, making sure to set the folder to the one you created in this tutorial.

Saving an image to JPEG using the batch command has two requirements in Photoshop. The image must be an 8-bit image and it must not have layers. Before pressing “record”, navigate to “Image” then “Mode”. Change the image to a “16-bit”, so that we’ll have the option to change to 8-bit while recording. After this, press the “record” button and get ready to create the action.

Once you press “Record”, Photoshop will save everything you do into the action file. Playing the action file back again will repeat whatever you did. Navigate back to “Image” then “Mode” and change the file back to an 8-bit image. In the “Actions” window, you should see “Convert Mode” come up underneath the action’s title, like this.

Now, navigate to “Layers” and then “Flatten Image”, second from the bottom. Flatten Image should appear underneath the “Convert Mode” step.

Now hit “SHIFT + CTRL + S” to enter the “Save As…” dialog box. It doesn’t matter where you save the image, nor what you choose for the title, as long as you make sure you select “JPEG”. As long as there is a “Save As…” step in this action, it’s fine — we’re then going to tell the batch command to over ride the “Save As…” command, allowing you to save wherever you want from within the “Batch” dialog box. After this step, hit the “stop recording” button.

Note that while “10″ is a good setting for perfect quality with a smaller filesize than “12″, it is often too big. Thankfully, when setting up the Batch command, it will prompt you with this dialog box again, so if you’re working with images that don’t need excellent quality you can drop it down to 6 or 8.

Now, navigate to “File”, “Automate”, “Batch”. Select the Action you just created from the drop-down box, and make sure you select “Open Images” to tell the script that you want to work with the images you have open in Photoshop. Make sure to select “Override Action “Save As” Commands”.

If you didn’t add the “Flatten Image” or “8-bit” commands, then any 16- or 32-bit images or images with layers will stop the Batch process and ask you to navigate to the folder you’d like to save them in. It’s frustrating, and if you hit “Cancel” it simply exits the image without saving. However, if you choose to save as a .PSD, you can leave the 8-bit or Flatten Image steps out of the action, and the batch process will go through without an error.

That’s it! You’ve now successfully setup a way to automatically save [as a JPEG] and exit every image you have open.

Expanding this tutorial

This process is not just useful for saving images as JPEG files. You can expand it to batch resize images for Facebook, or sharpen and then save and exit each image. So how do you do each of those steps?

To batch resize for Facebook using Photoshop, you simply need to resize the largest side to 604px. This is the native size of Facebook’s photo albums, so that Facebook doesn’t resize poorly. This will preserve the original sharpness you save at, which is very handy for uploading images you really want to look good.

Find out the size of your image, in pixels. Let’s take the 10MP Nikon D40x for example. It produces an image that is 3872 x 2592 pixels. In order to make the largest side [3872 pixels] down to 604 pixels, you’d need to scale it down by “604 / 3872 = 0.15599″ or 15.59%. Create a new action, and go to “Image Size”. Change “pixels” to “percentage” and enter a value of 15.59%, with all other steps the same.

Now, whenever you run this action, it will resize to “Facebook size” before saving - a very hand technique which will save time on uploads, and improve the quality of your facebook pictures.

You could also enter a sharpening step, a step to give the colors a little boost. Just make sure you have the three key steps : convert to 8-bit, flatten layers, save as. Other than that, anything is possible!

This post is tagged actions, batch save, facebook