Batch Processing: step-by-step how to edit multiple photos in Photoshop

You probably know all about Actions. But if not, in Photoshop, they enable you to record certain tasks and then repeat them to edit multiple photos at once.

It’s simply a matter of creating a new action in the Actions Panel, hitting the Record button, applying your effect, adjustment or other tweak and then hitting the Stop button. Whenever you play the action in future on an image, the same effect or adjustment will be applied.

But if you have a number of images to which you want to apply an effect, adjustment or series of tweaks, you need to pay a visit to the File>Automate menu.

In this sub-menu, go to Batch. Here, choose an Action to play using the drop-down menu in the Play section of the Dialog Box. Here’s how to do it.

In the Source section, choose the folder on your PC or Mac where the images you want to adjust are stored. There are a number of options here, enabling you to include subfolders and turn off any colour profile warnings and open Dialog Boxes.

Most of the time you’ll check all of these – especially if you want everything to just run without any intervention.

In the Destination section of the Dialog Box, you can choose to save and close the files, or save them in a different destination with a new name. And finally, you can choose whether to stop for errors or just log them to a file.

This approach still requires you to open Photoshop. If you want to just sit back and watch Photoshop open automatically and perform your adjustments for you, create a Droplet.

Go to File>Automate> Create Droplet. The Dialog Box is identical to the Batch example, with the exception of being able to save a Droplet at the top.

Hit the Save Droplet In>Choose button and name and save. Set up your batch processing.

Now you can drag files into the droplet to perform your adjustments.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 10th, 2012 at 7:00 am and is filed under Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a comment. Pinging is currently not allowed.