For those of you who don't already know, Photoshop has these nifty little features called Actions. Now, these actions can be used for many things, including the creation of beautiful and eye catching effects, maximizing your productivity, or simply to carry out the tedious and mundane tasks that your lazy ass just doesn't feel like doing. I recently had the pleasure of turning .diplomat.'s beautiful "Daze" theme for SMF into something of my own, and being the genius that I am, I used these wonderful actions and a little thing called Batch Processing. I'm a dedicated designer, but there was no way I was gonna sit in front of my computer for hours changing the Hue/Saturation for every single image for my forum with my 2 year old taking his diaper off and discovering that the stuff inside it could substitute for paint (that's a story for a later date) What is Batch Processing, you say? Well, it's something that processes a batch, you idiot, and now I'm going to show you how to do it.

When you're creating an action you need it to do one thing: Something. In my case, I needed to change the Hue/Saturation for 75+ images from blue to my "trademark" teal. Maybe you need an action for a different purpose, but humor me and tell yourself, "Hey, I need to make my image the same color as hers!" Next, you'll need something to work on. Get a small image, like an icon, preferrably the one I'm using for this tutorial.

Now go to Window > Actions and make sure it is checked. If it is, you should see a tab in the Layers Palette labeled, surprise, Actions.

Click on the arrow button to open the Actions menu and go to "new Set." This will create a folder for your action (you don't really need the folder, it just helps with organization.)


Go back to the Actions menu and select "New Action." I'll give you three guesses as to what this does. Now, before recording an action you need to figure out the steps you'll need to take and the order in which you'll need to take them. Since this is a pretty simple action and I can do this is my sleep, I don't have to... but just keep that in mind.


Okie dokes, here's the fun part: Recording. See that little circle icon in between the square and the triangle at the bottom of the palette? Push it. Now everything you do in Photoshop will be recorded until the end of action. Don't worry, if you screw up, just stop the action by clicking the square icon and go back to your last step.

For my action, the first thing I need to do is change the Mode of the image to RGB, since .gif files are saved in Index mode which don't take too kindly to colorization. So with the action recording, go to Image > Mode > RGB. Now take a look at your Actions palette, it should look like this:


Next, we'll have to strip the image of it's current color to make adding our (my) own color easier to apply, so go to Image > Adjustment > Desaturate.


Now that we have a naked grey image, we need to add some color. Make sure your action is still recording and go to Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation. I have the settings for my teal color saved in a .ahu (Hue/Saturation) file already so all I have to do is click Load and select Teal.ahu, but since you don't have that you'll have to use the sliders. Use these settings for my color:


Woo, we've now SunBlinded the icon! All that's left to do now is save it for the web. Is your action still recording? Good. Go to File > Save For The Web and set your file type and optimization settings. I use the standard GIF settings, but whatever floats your boat, dude. Select your destination directory and save. If your Actions palette looks like this:


Stop recording and say "Yay, I made an action!" because you're finished. Now to put your newly born action into... ahem... action, we'll do a Batch Process. What this will do is take all the images in a specified directory and apply whatever changes were recorded in the action. Just for the sake of the tutorial, create a directory and drop some images into it, or just duplicate one that you already have.

Go to File > Automate > Batch and make sure the name of the Action Set you just created is in the first dropdown list and the name of the Action is in the second. Set the third dropdown box (next to Source) to Folder and use the Choose button to find your duplicated or created folder of images. For destination, you can either leave it set to it's default "None" to have the action applied and saved in the source folder, or save the "actionized" images into a separate folder. Once you have everything configured to your liking, click OK.


Now sit back and watch your images color themselves because you're using Actions and Batch Processing to do your dirty work

nice tutorial...i like your work it is great...this will certianly speed things up for me in the future thanks !

Thank you!

I'm glad someone else besides me can benefit from my countless hours of messing around in Photoshop

psd CS4 animation sequence opened in layers. want to run action script over layers.Photoshop Tutorial: Creating Actions For Batch Processing

Hi. I have a .Mov animation sequence opened up into layers and I want to run my action script over all the 100+ frame layers. I've selected the automate/ batch/ on the 'opened file' but the commands 'whatever' is not currently available meaning I'm still doing something wrong?

Does that make sense? 

kind regards - Ken

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