Automating Tasks in Photoshop Using Actions and Batch Processing

Photoshop's actions allow you to record one or more steps and then easily play that back over and over again, either on one image or you can batch process a lot of images. So in this example, I want to take all of these images and convert them to grayscale or black and white and put them into this folder here. When we are recording actions, we're going to tell Photoshop to record and it will record all of the steps as we do those.

It will record every step, which includes opening specific files. For example, if you want to open a specific logo file, place it on, put it into a certain opacity to kind of form a watermark. So if you don't want the action to record the step of opening a file, make sure you open that file first so it doesn't record that step.

So it doesn't matter which image you're doing this on as long as this image has the ability for you to do whatever steps it is that you want to do. We go into our window menu and open up our actions panel. I'm going to pull this out so it's on screen all the time here, just so we can focus on it.

Here are a bunch of default actions that are kind of showing you some examples of things that you can do. But I'm going to create my own folder of my own actions. So I'm going to create a new folder here, call it Dan's actions.

And into this, I can record my actions. You get everything set up, ready to go, and then I want to create a new action. So I'm going to click the new button here with my folder selected.

And I'm going to call this convert to Grayscale. And if we wanted to assign this a certain color to make it stand out, we can. But we can also assign an F key.

So if this is something you do all the time, we can assign it to one of the function keys to make it easier to run this. I'm not going to bother doing that. I'm just going to create this.

And when I hit record, you don't have to worry about the speed in which you record. Just go about doing your normal actions. It will record each step that you do.

When it plays these things back, it's going to play it back as fast as it can. So you don't have to worry about trying to race through this. Just take your time, do everything correctly.

Now it's in record mode. The recording light is on. And you could do any series of steps, one or more steps.

So I'm going to go in and convert to Grayscale. And it records that step. Now, you can continue doing more steps.

For example, if I want to do a filter here, let's say I want it to be a blurry gray scale. I go in and convert. I do the Gaussian blur.

And let's say I do that. OK. Now I'm going to hit stop.

And it's stopped the recording. Now I'm going to revert this file here. So we go back to the original.

So I do revert. And if I choose this convert to grayscale, it's going to go through all of those steps as fast as possible. So I hit play.

And I've got a blurred grayscale image. Now, as far as some of these steps go, if you need to go back and add any more, you can select a step. And you can hit record.

And you can do more things. I'm going to stop the recording. So you can add things later.

You can also say maybe you want to choose how much Gaussian blur is going to happen each time you run this. You can say stop the step and let me interact with it at that moment. So you can open this up here and see what it's currently doing.

But over here, I can put an interaction to say show me that dialogue, if there's something that I can have an opinion on each time this runs. So with that turned on, now when I run this action here by hitting play, it's going to stop at that step, let me interact with it. And then when I hit OK, it'll continue doing all of the rest of the steps.

If I don't want this step, which I actually don't want this step, I can also trash that step and get rid of it. So that now all this action does is simply convert to grayscale. All right, so let's just test this out.

I'm going to do a revert and run this. And it does convert to grayscale. You can do this, of course, one image at a time, just opening up and running that action.

But you can also put this together with batch actions. So if we want to automate things, we can say I want to run a batch process, which is going to allow you to run an action on a bunch of images. So I'm going to go to File, Automate, Batch.

And in my folder, Dan's Actions, I've got my particular action. And I want to say, what is it taking in and where is it putting it? So the source could be files that I have open. I can choose my folder here.

I'm going to hit Choose. And I'm going to browse to the folder that I want to work with here, which is this 6A, Actions. Anything that's in that folder, I want it to process.

If there are subfolders in there that you also want to process, you can include those. But I don't have subfolders that have images inside. So I just want to do things that are in that main folder.

Where is it going to put those things? Over here under Destination, you could just save and close them if you want to change originals. But be very careful about that because if you don't have backups, you could permanently change your original images in a way that you can't recover. So I want to put them into a separate folder.

So I'm going to choose Folder and then choose Browse and go into that Actions folder. And I want to put them into this grayscale folder. I'm going to put them into there.

This is the name that it's going to use. So right now, it's going to use the current document name and then put on the file extension. However, I want to keep the current document name and then say dash grayscale.

And then down here, I want this to be the lowercase file extension as opposed to capital case file extension. So you can build this up and it shows you an example of what this file name would look like. So it'll say whatever the current file name is, dash grayscale.

And then the current file extension. When I hit OK, it does it as quickly as possible. And it is now done.

Amazing as that might seem, all of those images are there. You're almost like, damn, I didn't even see it working. It's amazing.

It just kind of does its work behind the scenes. And now we have all of those grayscale images. Pretty amazing.

So this is just an example, a very simple example of converting to grayscale. But any series of steps that you want to record and play back, either individually or in a batch process, actions can be a great way to do repetitive things over and over again. Now, while we're on this topic of kind of doing things automatically, another idea here is that you might want to create little versions of those.

So maybe all of these images here, I want to resize and just make smaller versions. Maybe for a thumbnail gallery on a website or something. For that, there's already something created.

We don't have to record our own action for this. We can go into File, Scripts, Image Processor. And the whole point of this is to convert into different file formats.

And if you want to, you can resize it to fit a certain size. So first, we choose what images we want this to work on. So I'm going to hit Select and go into My Class Files, into my Actions folder.

And I want to do it on everything in here. Those are my original color images. Now, I then want to save them into the folder here in my Actions.

I wanted to put it into my color thumbnails because I'm working with my original ones. I am going to create grayscale versions, but I'm going to start with the ones that are out here, which are my color versions. Remember, my grayscales are in here.

So I'm going to start with the ones out here and put these into my thumbnails color. And it will save them as a JPEG with a certain quality, convert them to sRGB, which is good for things like the web, and I can resize it if I want to, to fit into a certain space. So if I want to make little thumbnails, this will not make them square.

This will keep them that if they're vertical or horizontal, it'll keep the same aspect ratio, but it will fit them into one of these widths or heights. The other size might be smaller than that. So for example, it could be 100 by 200, or it could be 200 by 100, but it will fit into that space.

So this will create those JPEGs. I'm not going to run an action this time, like convert to grayscale, because right now I just want to resize them and save them as JPEGs and that's all. I'm going to come back and run this again with the convert to grayscale option to make grayscale versions of those.

So I'm going to go ahead and hit run, and it saves out all of those. And here I can look in my thumbnails color in the JPEG folder, and I can see all of those. By the way, if you want to preview those in kind of a more graphic way, the bridge, Adobe Bridge, is a separate application that you can install.

If it's not already installed, go to your Creative Cloud app and install it. And in Photoshop, you can say File, Browse in Bridge. Adobe Bridge is kind of a design kind of graphic version of your desktop.

So on the Mac, like your Finder, or on Windows, your Desktop Explorer. And in here, you can browse your computer. So I can go into my desktop, go into my class files.

And if you want to make these things bigger, you can resize this to make it bigger and easier to see. I can go to my Photoshop class, go down here to my actions folder. Here are all my color images, and I can make these bigger, easier to see.

I can go into my grayscale to see all the grayscale versions. And I can go back, go into my thumbnails, JPEG. And these are quite small.

Look at how small this is in this preview over here. As opposed to, if I go back here into my main folder, notice this one is much bigger, right? And so we can also see the pixel dimensions over here. We can see this is 2,000 pixels wide, whereas these are the 200 by 133.

See, like I said, it does fit it into that space. So either the height or the width, one of them will be 200, the other one will be 200 or less. So it did work at creating all of those color thumbnails, those little versions.

And I'm going to go back over to Photoshop now, and I'm going to do the grayscale versions of them. So I'm going to go back to my scripts image processor. And this time, I'm still going to do it to all of those color images, but I'm going to put them into the other folder here.

I'm going to put them into my grayscale folder. And I'm going to run an action using my convert to grayscale. So not only will it save out JPEGs and it'll resize it, but it's also going to run my action, so it'll convert them to grayscale as well.

So I hit run, does it as fast as possible. And here we have in our grayscale folder, we've got little grayscales. Again, if I wanted to do that in the bridge, I can go to file, browse in bridge, can come back to my actions folder here, look in my grayscale, and I've got these little teeny under 200 pixel thumbnails ready to go for maybe an image gallery or something.

So between the batch processing and this image processor, both of these are ways that you can automate some of the things that you do so that you can work smarter rather than harder, and Photoshop can do all of that hard work for you. Think about all the things that you might do repeatedly over and over and over again, and you could record actions for those things. Now, things that don't work well as actions are things that, like, let's say, painting over a specific area that would vary from image to image.

It's not going to be able to figure out how to, like, let's say, go into different faces and, like, darken the chin of a bunch of different faces where the chin line is all different. So this does have to be repetitive actions that can be easily reproduced so it doesn't do everything that Photoshop does, but any kind of easily repeated thing where there's a series of steps, those can be saved into an action. So try this yourself in Exercise 6a.