Photoshop Tutorial: Editing a Batch of Photos

I’m still learning new things about Photoshop every time I open the program or listen to another person talk about what things they do with it. I’m going to give you a short tutorial on how to edit a large number of images in very little time using the batch and actions features.

Go ahead and find yourself a group of pictures you want to edit and open up Photoshop. There have been times before I discovered this method that I chose not to edit my pictures because I didn’t want to spend hours (or in some cases days) going through and editing my pics one by one. With this method, whether you have two or two-thousand pictures to edit, you can set Photoshop to automatically perform a set path of tasks to perform on each picture and save them to wherever you want while you go get a coffee. This could be useful if you had bad lighting issues one day while shooting that you need to fix or if you want to put a stamp or effect on a number of images or whatever you can think of.

Before I start, I want to let you know that I am running Adobe Photoshop CS2 on a Mac. If you have another CS version or are on a PC, you should be able to follow along just fine. It’s mostly just a warning in case my screenshots look funny to you. Let’s begin!

1. Open up a photo, any photo you want to edit.

2. Go to the Windows tab up top and open up the Actions window. Windows > Actions

3.With the open Actions window, click the icon that looks like a folded piece of square paper. This creates a new action. You can name the action anything you want, but leave everything else the way it is and hit OK.

4.Now in the Actions window, the action you just created should be selected and a red circle below it should be pressed. The red circle button is the record button. Anything you do in Photoshop from this point forward will be recorded under your new action. You can pause and continue recording whenever you want by switching between the stop (square) button and record button.

5.With your actions recording, perform any changes you want to make to your picture. As you edit your pictures, you will see your actions being recorded under the action you created.

6.When you are done editing your photo, hit the stop (square) button in your actions window.

7.Now go to File and select Automate and then Batch. File > Automate > Batch

8.The Batch menu should now be open, this is where the magic happens. Mouse over to the Action pull down menu and select the new action you just made and recorded. Then select the Source pull down menu and select where the group of pictures is coming from you want to edit. Next, go to the Destination pull down menu and select where you want your edited pictures to be saved at.

I would recommend to look at the options presented to you and select skipping over the command and error prompts so your actions perform on all of the pictures without pausing at every one for you to select ’save.’ Once you have done all of this, hit ok.

Now Photoshop should be running through all of the pictures you selected to edit, performing the exact same adjustments you did on the original picture. Depending on how many pictures you selected to edit, this could take a few minutes or a few hours to complete, but at least you’re not sitting at your computer and a slave to Photoshop during that time! Go get a snack or watch a show and let the magic happen.

I hope this helps you!