Automating Your Photographic Workflow

Automating your workflow can save many hours in processing your image files. Essentially Photoshop provides three methods of automation to process your image files. The first two methods, Actions and Batch Processing are quite easy to learn, however the third, Scripts is far more complex and requires programming knowledge.

Actions

The actions feature in Photoshop allows you to record each step as you perform actions. Each action recorded can be replayed on a different image.

If you can not see the action palette, click on Windows > Actions and it will appear. To commence a new action, click on the area at the top right of the Actions palette. A popup menu will be displayed, select New Action, enter your name for the action and your keyboard combination for playing it. Select the color to be displayed for this action and press the record button. Now perform all the steps required on the image and when completed hit the Stop button.

To apply a saved action to a new image, open the image file select the play button at the bottom of the Actions palette.

Batch Processing

The batch processing in Photoshop is basically an extension of the Actionsprocess. Once an action has been recorded it allowsyou to apply the action automaticallt to all the images in a folder

The batch processing pacility can be accessed from the File menu, File > Automate > Batch where you choose the action to be applied and the Source and Destination of the files to be processed.

Scripts

If you want even more automation than batch processing then you can write scripts in programming languages. Scripts are a series of commands that tell Photoshop how to process the image in code language. Scripts are pieces of code and are far more comlpex than batch processing however they offer much more flexibility for the programming literate users.

Certain sripts are available on the internet for use if required to provide various actions.