Dan Morton

Some years back, I was tasked with revamping a full training guide — a full-color book consisting of over 300 pages and approximately 1,000 images.

A major problem I ran across was that each image was in RGB mode instead of CMYK, which meant that I had to change each image to make it compatible with the printer’s specs.

Not knowing any better at the time, I arduously proceeded to manually… change… each… and… every… image — individually — to CMYK.

We’ve all had those situations where the same repetitive change is needed on a large group of photographs. Maybe you had to modify them to a manageable size, create a set of thumbnails, or apply a watermark to each photo.

Instead of opening each individual file and applying the same change over and over again, let Photoshop do the majority of the work for you.

Automate Batch is a tool that allows you to apply an action to a batch of images.

To start off, make sure your Actions Palette is open (Windows > Actions). For the sake of this tutorial, I’m going to modify the size of a group of vertical images to create thumbnails.

Open one of the images that are to be adjusted. Click on the Create a New Action icon on the bottom of the Actions Palette.

When the New Action window appears, give your action a name. Make sure it’s something that would easily identify your action for further use. Then hit Record.

NOTE: Each modification made to this photo from this point forward until you hit the stop button will be recorded to this action.

Now we’re going to input our settings. Go to Image > Image Size and set your resolution to 72 ppi and your pixel height to 125 pixels. Then hit OK.

On the bottom of your Actions Palette, hit the Stop icon, indicating that your action is complete.

Then go to File > Automate > Batch to open the Automate Batch tool.

Select the Action that you would like to apply to your images (the one we just created), indicate which source folder you would like to tool to be applied to (your image folder), choose your destination folder (the folder you would like to place the modified images into), and then press OK.

The Automate Batch tool will now apply your change to each image in your source folder and save the modified images to a new folder.

NOTE: While Automate Batch is a terrific tool, it does have its limitations.

With this tool, you’re applying the same change to each photo. A perfect example of this is when you’re resizing images. Modifying the height of a vertical image would have a different effect than when you apply the same height setting to a horizontal image.

Try it out and let me know what you think. If you have any questions please leave a comment.

Tags: Graphic Design, image, Intermediate, Photoshop, Tutorial

If you’ve ever worked in Photoshop, you’ve undoubtedly experienced that sinking feeling that occurs after you’ve completed a cutout, realizing too late that you’ve accidentally erased a part of the picture that should’ve remained.

There are many ways to avoid this problem when doing cutouts. This tutorial is going to focus on using layer masks to erase, but the overall theory revolves around protecting your original image. The least amount of destruction that an image goes through the better.

Using layer masks to erase in Photoshop doesn’t actually remove any part of the image – it hides the part that you don’t want visible.

Let’s take this picture of the St. Louis Arch against a cloudy sky background. Begin by selecting the background. There are many ways to do this but we’ll leave those for another tutorial.

Now we have to change the selection from the background to the arch, so inverse your selection (Select > Inverse or ctrl-shift-I). The “marching ants” should now encircle the arch. Then press the Add Layer Mask button on the Layers palette, which will apply a layer mask to the current layer.

Your layer palette should now show a layer mask applied.

With layer masks, black is hidden while white is visible.

What’s nice about this tactic is that the background is still there. The layer mask is just hiding the area that’s colored black. If you want to show any part of the background or if you noticed an error in your cutout, simply grab your paintbrush, make white your foreground color, and paint in the area that you want visible on your layer mask.

Tags: cutout, image, Intermediate, layer masks, Photoshop