In this Photoshop tutorial you will learn how to very quickly automate a batch process in Photoshop CS4. Let’s say you need to resize 100 images to a width of 300px. Rather than resizing all these images manually in Photoshop you can create a Photoshop action and automate the action 100 times with a Photoshop batch process. This will give you a quick and easy way of resizing all your images automatically. You can even perform other actions on your images like applying filters, blurs and other effects. To automate a batch process in Photoshop we need to firstly create a Photoshop action then apply this action to our images via a Photoshop batch process . I’ll outline how to do this below in a few simple steps.
How to create a Photoshop Action
- Firstly let’s open one of your images in Photoshop.
- Open the actions window by clicking on “Window –> Actions“.
- Create a new Photoshop action by clicking on the action options in the top right corner of the actions panel and selecting “New Action …“.Give your action a name like “resize 300px width”.
- Photoshop has now started recording your action. Let’s now resize our image to 300px by clicking on “Image –> Image Size..” and entering a width of 300px. We then save our image, “File –> Save“.
- We now click on the stop button in the bottom of the actions panel as we have finished creating our Photoshop action. Now let’s apply this action to all of our images.
How to automate a Photoshop batch process
- Click on “File –> Automate –> Batch“.
- In the Batch window we select our action that we just created, “Resize 300px width” and then we choose the folder that contains all our images that we want to resize.
- Click on OK and let it run. You’re done! It may take Photoshop a while to finish its batch processing depending on the speed of your computer.
So that’s how to automate a batch process in Photoshop. It’s a very handy way to perform the same action on a number of images.
Adham Dannaway
Web Designer and Front End Developer with a passion for web design, coding, blogging, WordPress and chewing gum. Check out my web design portfolio and follow me on Twitter and Facebook!
Hmmmmm
Can I do batch add watermarks?
Yes you can run a batch process to add a logo or watermark to your images. You will need to create an action to do this. Simply create a new action and copy your logo to the clipboard. Paste your logo as a new layer then select the background layer followed by your new logo layer. Now click the align right and align bottom buttons to align your logo to the bottom right of your image. Save your image and stop your action. Now you can apply this action to all your images.
Excellent tutorial! This is such a helpful action.
Oh my gosh! I Wish I would’ve known this before I spent hours resizing a huge directory of photos for a fiend! lol. There are many possibilities with this. Thank you!
Glad I could help. Photoshop is an awesome piece of software with so many functions. I have barely scratched the surface of its potential.