Oct 25
Image Processor, a secret inside Photoshop CS2
2005 at 06.28 am posted by Veerle
Most of my readers will probably recognize the following situation where a client drops off a bunch of photographs to be used in their new website. In the scenario for this client we needed to create thumbs and larger images to be used in the excellent SlideShow Pro.
So what are the options? Well you could of course create an action for it but that isn’t always the most convenient way to handle things. Adobe has added a nice addition to Photoshop CS2 called ”Image Processor”. Image Processor let’s you batch process a folder of images, set a safe location, choose JPEG, PSD or TIFF, add a color profile, crop to a certain dimension and even copyright it all without setting up an action.
As I said above, we used it to crop images to a certain dimension without any trouble. All you need to do is go to File > Scripts > Image Processor and you’ll get the options window. The process is really straight forward and you can even safe it for future usage.
And btw it doesn’t stop here, if you have a certain action that you want to apply as well, no problem, just select one from the drop-down menus. I don’t know about you but this is a clever new secret hidden in Photoshop CS2. You can view the end result of our finished website here.
11served
1
I love recording actions in Pshop, and I haven’t had the chance to use the Image Processor since I am still on CS.
Does it have a way to automatically recognize vertical and horizontal orientations yet? I have always had to make two versions of a script, one for wide images, one for tall ones. Would be good to have a conditional in there that could determine orientation.
2
that seems really similar to the batch processor in past photoshops. what exactly is new in CS2 that you could not do before?
3
@Dave Simon, it recognizes the vertical and horizontal orientation indeed. I did a test with a landscape and portrait image and entered 400px for the width and 250px for the height. The result was that the landscape image was 400px width and the portrait had a height of 250px. The proportions of the images did remain the same and there was no cropping done, only resizing.
@Stefan Hayden, you don’t need to create an action. This is an alternative besides Batch. You can choose to combine this with actions if you like, but you don’t have to. For quick jobs this is great since you don’t have to use an action (like in Batch). So in CS2 you have both, Image Processor and Batch. Like I said in the article, you only have to choose a folder and that’s it, that’s a real time saver. Also, see my remark to Dave above.
4
That’s cool--I’ve never seen that before. But when it says “resize”, does it mean scale or crop?
5
oh, wow that is cool. Thanks Veerle!
6
I’m probably a bear of little brain, but for some reason I’ve never been able to get a handle on Photoshop batches. This makes things much easier. Thanks for letting us know!
7
Veerle,
I looked at your S&L;web site - it is very neat, once again! Then I looked at the “view source” and am trying to figure out how you created your nav bar at the top. I guess it is all stylesheets? But they look like images, so I can’t figure it out! I can see where they are contained inside of a <div id> tag, but how did you get them to look the way they do with just css? I guess this is beyond me!
Also, the background images in the header are very neat with the blue circles. In my browser, the dark gray background of the page also looks like a gradient, going from dark to light, from the top to the bottom of the page. Is it, or is it something else, like dynamic xhtml? It seems you have all of the secrets contained in those css stylesheets! Oh, well.
I am using Photoshop CS, so don’t think my version has the image processor, but thanks for the information on how to use it.
8
Does this also create a slideshow, Veerle, or just re-sized images?
I had a requirement recently where the client wanted a different slideshow on each page, and it took an age to find a decent script to do this (they wanted an auto running show with no buttons).
The result is at: http://www.assinderturnham.co.uk/preview/dilapidations.html
I’d be interested to hear if ‘Image processor’ can do this?
9
Cool tip, Veerle.
For those who do not have Photoshop CS2, don’t worry, there is even quicker solution (well...maybe not easier) for changing a set of pictures. You’ve got to have a Mac and be willing to use Terminal.app, though…
In Terminal run following commands:
cd path_to_directory_with_your_picturessips --resampleHeightWidthMax 450 -s format png * --out your_output_directory
This one resamples all your pictures to 450px and change the format to png. The converting process is VERY quick, even quicker then starting Photoshop…
There are several other functions built into sips command including adding/changing profiles, cropping, changing resolution etc. Just run
man sipsin Terminal to find out.
Hope, this helps someone…
10
I just wanted to comment on using the image processor when resizing images. If you are resizing vert. and horz. images it does recognize the orientation of the images and it won’t crop the images, but it does not make them the same size. What I mean is, if for example you enter width 1200px and height 1800px(4x6), it will size a vert image to 4x6, but a horz image will be sized to 4x2.6. It doesn’t know to switch the deminsions.
I found this out after processing 150 images. All of the vert images were fine but the horz images were smaller. I just had to go back and switch the deminsions and reprocess the horz images.
I hope this makes sense.
11
Brian,
you might wanna try this free script :
http://actionlogic.blogspot.com .
Its a conditional action script for CS2.
works well for me