Actions and Batch Processing in Photoshop

I'm starting to get more into the photography, which means that I'm having to deal with a larger volume of photos. With this hightened quantity, I need to develop some actions and batch processes in Photoshop to do the "standard" processing that I do to all the pictures I take from an event before I post them to my web page for viewing/ordering.

I've created these actions in the past, but I've never used any sort of batch processing. What I want to do is pick a folder, and have a specific action run against the entire folder, that is possible within PS right?

My action basically does a little sharpening, resizing, typically a warming filter, and saves the resized copy to another folder so I can easily upload them to a website.

Anyone have any tips/websites that can help me accomplish these goals.

Thanks in advance,
Joel

[QUOTE=
I've created these actions in the past, but I've never used any sort of batch processing. What I want to do is pick a folder, and have a specific action run against the entire folder, that is possible within PS right?

My action basically does a little sharpening, resizing, typically a warming filter, and saves the resized copy to another folder so I can easily upload them to a website.

Anyone have any tips/websites that can help me accomplish these goals.

Thanks in advance,
Joel[/QUOTE]

Hi Joel,

I think these are the best features of photoshop! It's failry straigh forward: file > automate > batch. The only tricky part is saving jpeg without gettting the "jpeg options menu." which expects manual input (and I haven't found a workaround within the batch window).

I'm not sitting in front of my computer to recolect exactly how I get around this. However, what I think I do(!) is COPY all the files to a new folder, run the batch mode and just re-save them to the SAME location. This overwrites the file, and because of this, avoids the "jpeg options menu." Avoiding this menu was the only snag I ran into doing batch processing.

Another great tool, IMO, is Breezebrowser (http://www.breezebrowser.com/). It's an excelent and simple tool to use when you don't need to do much editing. I think they have a free demo too. It allows resizing, sharpening, levels, color space change, noise reduction, saving to a new directory (by default, nonetheless) and maybe more, in one easy to use window called "proofs."

Mike

I suggest not saving in Jpeg format, it is a very lossy format. Use .psd or .tiff, they take more space but you will not lose image quality.