When it comes to photo editing, doing things in bulk is the way to go. Well, as much as possible. I couldn’t even imagine (and I cringe when I think about this) taking hundreds and hundreds of photos and unloading them onto my computer, only to, say, resize them one by one. Back in the day, I did this all the time. Today, that thought makes me want to cry.
Software makers are onto this type of feeling. They’ve made it easier and easier to edit certain aspects of a photo. They’ve also made it extraordinarily easy to edit photos en masse. On this very blog, I’ve shown you a few methods that help when it comes to this type of thing. A few posts come to mind:
Can You Save Files & Photos Directly From Adobe Camera Raw?
How Can I Open Multiple Photos From Adobe Bridge Into Camera Raw?
Renaming Multiple Files at Once in Adobe Bridge
Independently Editing Multiple Images in Adobe Camera Raw
How to Copy Edits Across Multiple Photos in Adobe Lightroom
I mean, the list goes on and on. Adobe, in particular, has truly gotten the message. They’re awesome at incorporating the idea of “multiple” into their applications.
In today’s post, I’m going to let you in on a little known technique that will aid you in taking care of a few basic tasks. I’ll demonstrate how you can use Adobe Bridge and a feature called Image Processor to resize, format and save images to any location you desire. If you’ve never used Image Processor, I think you’re going to like this post.
Selecting Photos in Adobe Bridge
The very first thing I’m going to do for this demonstration is to find the folder with the demo images inside of it. Now, I’m just using these images as an example because they come in all shapes and sizes. As you read through this post, pretend that these images are yours from a photo shoot.
The next thing I’ll do is to select all the images I want to process and then head up to the Tools > Photoshop > Image Processor menu item and click.
Image Processor in Photoshop
Once I click on this menu item in Bridge, the Image Processor editor will open up inside of Photoshop. Here, take a look at it.
And just to let you know, you can also access the Image Processor through Photoshop itself. To do so, simply click the File > Scripts > Image Processor menu item to end up at the same place.
Either way, you’ll have the same ability to process multiple images.
Now, let’s take a look at the Image Processor panel. If you take a look at the screenshot above, you’ll see there are four sections.
The first section gives you the opportunity to select which images you wish to process. Since I already selected the images that were inside of Bridge, it says that there are 26 photos to edit.
The second section allows me to choose the location I’d like to save the output images. So, if you think about it, we really haven’t seen anything special yet. I’m sure you’ve selected images to open into Photoshop and have saved them out before. Let’s move onto the next section.
The third section is where things become much more fun. Here, we can choose to save the images as JPEG, PSD and/or TIFF. This is especially helpful if you’ve done things to the images and you want to make sure to save each one so it’s editable again, while saving JPEGs for blog use or a client.
The really cool part is that I can choose to limit the sizing of each image in this section. For this blog, I don’t go over 1000 pixels wide, so this would be very helpful. I know a lot of bloggers who like to keep their images anywhere between 800 and 1000 pixels. So, in this section, I’d check the Save as JPEG box and place 1000 in both the width field and the height field. I’d also set the Quality to something around an 8, because I like to reduce file size for online viewing.
If I were to save these images as PSDs as well, I’d probably leave off the image resizing because I’d want as much as possible to stay the way it originally was. But, if I had a good reason to, such as batch reducing the size for further editing, I certainly could make that change here.
The Preferences section is so cool I can’t even stand it. You have no idea how many times I’ve had to open each image I shot, one by one, to simply apply an action and and save that same image. If Photoshop had only offered this tool back in the day, my life would have been so much better. This was a long time ago, so I completely understand, but still.
If you have an action that you would like to apply to your images, you can set it here. You can also automatically add copyright information for each image as well.
Running the Process
After I’ve made all my settings, I can go ahead and click on the Run button. When I do this, Photoshop will work through every photo in the collection I indicated, one by one, and apply the changes I instructed it to. When it’s finished, things will look like this:
Let me explain what this is. The primary folder you’re looking at is the one where the images originated. I set things so these would be the photos that were processed. I chose to save them as JPEGs and have those resized to no larger than 800 pixels wide or tall. Then, I set the Image Processor to save these images as PSDs as well. I didn’t apply any actions or anything like that. I also instructed Photoshop to output the images to the same folder.
In the folder above, we have the original images. In the two sub-folders, we have the JPEG and PSD files. The PSD files are just like the originals in that nothing was changed about them. The JPEG files have been reduced in size and quality. That’s pretty awesome.
I hope you see the value in this tool. If you’re an avid photographer and are someone who takes many, many photos, I’m sure you’ve found yourself in a situation where you’d like to process a whole lot of photos at once. Well, this is what you should be using.
If you have any questions or concerns about this post, please let me know in the comment section below. Thanks for reading!
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