Using Photoshop to Edit Batches of Digital Photos by Chris Limone

Using Photoshop to Edit Batches of Digital Photos

by Chris Limone

This week we are going to look at batch processing using actions and the droplet function in Adobe Photoshop. You’ve probably taken your camera to a party, a wedding, or on vacation, and you’ve got hundreds of photos to sift through and send to all your friends. (No, Adobe Photoshop can’t pick out the good ones for you.) But it can make them all nice and snappy by correcting colors and fixing the contrast of all of them at once. If a lot of your shots have a faded, or discolored look, this will vastly improve them.

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The first step is to locate all your new images. You should designate a temporary folder somewhere on your computer (I put a folder on my desktop for easy access) to download all your images into from your camera. In order to use the Batch function to edit the image, there must be an ACTION that tells Photoshop what to do to the images. Now open up Photoshop and I’ll show you how to create an action.

The actions palette is grouped with the history palette in the default workspace. If you don’t see it there, go to the ‘Window’ menu and make sure Actions has a check next to it.

Now select ‘File>Open…’ and select any image in the group. This will be the ‘guinea pig’ image on which we will create the action. Go to the actions palette and click the icon to create a new set. I named my set “Custom Actions”, but you can name it whatever you like. I put all the actions I create into this set.

On the bottom of the actions palette, click the ‘Create New Action’ button and name your action something like “Auto Contrast and Color”. Select the “Custom Actions” set, press ‘OK’ and Photoshop will now record everything you do to the image from now until you tell it to stop.

Now it’s important that you don’t go overboard editing the image because this is going to be the same process you apply to every other image, and not every image will have the same exact problem. So lets stick to the basics and just do an ‘Auto Contrast’ and ‘Auto Color’. (Auto Levels can be done also, but it tends to have more extreme variations on images that have a small range of colors.) *Technical note: ‘Auto Colors’ only works on RGB images. If your file is in CMYK format, go to ‘Image>Mode>RGB’. This will be recorded in the action and will apply to all the images in the batch.

After you’ve done the auto corrections, click the ‘stop’ button to stop recording. That’s it! You just created your first action. You can close the image now (save if you like, but it’s going to be part of the batch anyways so it’ll repeat the process).

Now go to ‘File>Automate>Batch’.

Choose the custom set and action you just created. The ‘Source’ is going to be the folder where all your images are. Click ‘Choose…’ to select that folder. You should also have the lower two boxes checked to ensure smooth operation.

The ‘Destination’ is where the edited images will be saved to. This should be a folder where you would normally store your images on your computer. The ‘Override Action “Save As” Commands’ box should be unchecked.

Press OK and sit back and watch the magic happen. You should see Photoshop working hard to open, edit, and save each image, one at a time.

It might seem like a lot of work and hassle to go through making an action and batching the images, but now that you’ve done it once, YOU NEVER HAVE TO DO IT AGAIN. Next time, go straight to ‘File>Automate>Batch’ and your custom set and action will be saved and waiting for you. If you always put your new images into that temporary folder you created, the only option you need to change is the destination folder. That’s it. It should take only 5 minutes to color correct 100 photographs. Pretty nifty, huh? It gets even easier if you use droplets.

Droplets are a more tactile way to do the same thing, but with droplets, you don’t even need Photoshop open to batch edit your images. Photoshop creates an icon which you can drag and drop an image (or a whole bunch of images) onto, and upon doing so, Photoshop will open, and apply the action associated with the droplet immediately.

In Photoshop go to ‘File>Automate>Create Droplet’. It looks remarkably similar to the ‘Batch’ options right? Choose where to save the icon for the droplet (I’d suggest your Desktop for easy access). Then set the same options for the ‘Play’ section as you set in doing the previous Batch.

For ‘Destination’ choose ‘SAVE AND CLOSE’ instead of ‘Folder’. This will overwrite the files directly instead of creating a copy. Press OK and you’re done. Now if you want a really quick edit of the photos you shot an hour ago, just download them from your camera to a folder on the desktop, and drag that folder directly onto the droplet icon.

Viola! Your images will look so much brighter and cleaner almost instantly!