Batch Editing Photos
One thing that a lot of us who share photos on the internet have in common, is that we can spend hours editing them. Almost every time I do a blog post, I have around 5 or 6 photos that I need to crop and shrink so they aren’t too big when they’re clicked on, and so they don’t take up all the storage memory.
A lot of the photo editing programs have ‘Batch Editing’, this allows you to open multiple photos and edit them all in exactly the same way very simply with just a few clicks, so you’re not having to sit there and manually alter every single one. It really saves a lot of time and effort. It is particularly useful if you have to shrink a lot of photos or have a batch that all need brightening up, or maybe you want to add a signature or apply an effect to create an abstract design….I found this really useful when working on photos for Ann’s abstract challenge a few months ago.
I’ve written a tutorial showing how to use the Batch Editing feature on Photoshop. I’ve only ever used Photoshop, so I can’t be sure that other programs do it the same way, but this should give you a good idea of what to look for on other programs. I’ve used shrinking as the example on the tutorial, because this is one I use most often. I know a lot of people like to add signatures or watermarks to their photos, batch editing is really good for this as long as you want the text to be exactly the same on each photo.
It’s always a good idea to have a practice first before recording an Action for batch editing. I usually keep notes for each effect applied, type size, or what the brightness and contrast levels were etc, then it’s easier to recreate. One thing that is important to point out, for certain effects, alterations or filters, for the results to be exactly the same, the resolution of the photos must be the same as each other and as the photo you originally worked out the Action on. If not, you could end up with type of different sizes for example.
I hope you find it useful and if you have any ideas for other tutorials, please let us know 🙂
PDF Tutorial: Batch Editing in Photoshop
7 thoughts on “Batch Editing Photos”
A clear and well-written tutorial Zed! Photoshop is one big mystery to me (and lots of others I should think) and I’ve only really got to grips with cropping and brightening.
Your first point in the tutorial is worth taking note of i.e. make copies, and I wish I’d known that a few years ago when I had a major disaster in the photo department because I hadn’t made copies!
Thanks, Lyn 🙂
I probably only use about 5% of Photoshop myself, and I learned the hard way about copies too 🙂
Oh, I just remembered, another great Action to make is ‘Rotate 90 degrees Clockwise’. I don’t know why, but my most recent cameras don’t rotate the photo if it’s taken ‘portrait’ way up, they are all downloaded as ‘landscape’, so I have to manually rotate them…or let Photoshop do it 🙂
Oh zed, you are soooo organised! I keep looking at photoshop tutorials – I have the book too, but all I can do reasonably well is distortion which is great fun, but not terribly useful!
I do remember to rotate it’s so annoying to have to lie on one’s side to look at photos! 🙂
By the way, I love that zig-zaggy neutral coloured piece. Gorgeous!
Thanks, Judith 🙂
I think I’d been using Photoshop for about 15 years before I was told about Batch Editing 🙂
I have no idea if it’s been on all the versions.
If there’s anything you’d like to do on it, put a post on the forum and I’ll see if it’s something I can help with.
Thanks Zed, that is a good prompt to help me get over my Photoshop phobia, and so pleased to hear there are a few others that are still finding it a mystery too.
I like that zig zag piece too, I think I saw it in a felting book I was looking at recently 🙂 I was very impressed with Ruths book and was so thrilled to see shots of felting folk that I know.
Thanks, Jane 🙂
Photoshop seems to have the reputation of being a program to distort or change photos and since the results are often awful it gets the blame instead of user error.
I saw Ruth’s book in your photo at the retreat 🙂