Tuesday, April 14, 2009

You learn something new every day!

Within the past week I've had 2 projects that required resizing over 100 photos for a photogallery. The originals were all high-quality digital photographs, thus rendered at over 1000 pixels wide. My image area was only 450 pixels wide. I envisioned DAYS of resizing, until I discoverd this new trick. Actually, its not "new" but it is new to me.

Photoshop Image Processor Is My New Best Friend!
Adobe Photoshop is the program I use for most of my image work and within that program, there is a wonderful tool called image processor. I use CS3 and this is how it works (for anyone who might need to use it and didn't know it exists):

  1. Open Photoshop and click File > Scripts > Image Processor
  2. In the Image Processor window, select the current folder in which you have your images
  3. I suggest you save the resized images to a different folder - so choose that folder (or create it if you haven't already). Even if you choose to have the resized photos in the same folder, photoshop will place them all into a new folder called "JPEG" so it doesn't overwrite what you have.
  4. File type is JPEG and quality of your choice (5 good, 10 is best).
  5. Since I am resizing my images for website use, select "Resize to Fit" and enter the desired dimensions. My photos were all different heights, so I used a set width of 450 pixels and an arbitrary height that I knew would cover any photo I had. The nice thing is the aspect ratio is kept if the photo is shorter than the dimension entered.
  6. Click Run and Photoshop will start the processor. In a matter of seconds the photos are all resized!
GOTTA LOVE IT!

2 comments:

KathyF said...

I'm curious; why didn't you just do this with iPhoto? I rarely use Photoshop since iPhoto will do the basics for me.

Debbie said...

Rarely do I ever need to use "the basics". I'm usually manipulating the photos as well, so I am "in love" with photoshop and have used it since the 80s.