Preserved Topic: PS Batching...Can It Be Done?

I'm scanning in tons and tons (Well, 500) 35mm Slides and want to know if I can give PS a batch (right word?) job. I need it to crop out the frame aroundt the slides, then resize them all to 10.5 Inches high for printing. Can this be done, giving it an action then tell it do do it to a list of PS files?

Well the scaling could be easyly done with actions as long as the images are all the same aspect. I don't have a clue how you could have Photoshop determine the croping, The crop would have to be the same for all image.

The photoshop 7 scripting plug-in would allow for conditional scaling based on the images starting size.

Just a though I just came up with:

You could perhap, if the background is different enough to border use select-color range to create a selection of the background and then use the menu crop function. Tt will crop to a basic bounding box made up of the outer most area of you selection. So inside sampled pixel wouldn't matter. It could take some playing but it could work, but depends on your image.


J. Stuart J.

Obviously Photoshop can do batch processing; if you'd like to know how the general idea works, I could post on that.

The tricky part here is the cropping. But I honestly don't think it'll be too hard IF all the images you're working with will have the exact same dimensions (meaning that the crop would be identical as well). All you need to do is put FOUR steps in the batch processing action, where you change the Canvas size four times, using a different anchor each time.

Say you need to crop 1 pica off each side of the image, just tell the canvas size to make the width equal to (original width - 1p), anchored to the left side; then make the width equal to (original width - 2p), anchored to the right side; then do something similar for top and bottom.

If I'm not making sense here, I'll make you a mini-tute.

Yep, they'll all be about the same aspect ration, and I'll need to trim off about 250 pixels from each side. I figured that actions would work originally, but not if Photoshop had the capability to do batch processing. I got the action down just now, but I can't figure out how to batch process it.

1. make sure all the files for batch processing are located in the same folder

2. choose file menu > Automate > Batch

3. choose a set from the set pop-up menu and choose an action from action pop-up menu

4. choose source: Folder.
and
Click Choose, then locate the folder that contains the files you want to process.

5. choose Destination: None to leave the files open after processing; or choose Save and Close to save the files over their originals; or choose Folder to save the files to a new folder (click Choose to specify the destination folder).

6. Optional; if you chose Folder for the previous steps and checked the Override Action "Save In" Commands box, the image will save to the folder designated in step 5 during playback when a Save command occurs in the action.

7. click OK. The batch processing will begin.

Taken from a guide to photoshop 6


~We're not here for long, we're here for fun~

With photoshop 7, you can also create droplets from you actions, it will create a little drag and drop icon on you desktop so if you do this often you can just scan and then drop the image on the droplet to process it in Photoshop.

Also you may find you need to check supress color management warning or else you may be prompted for each image.

Make sure you test it first and to choose your output folder different then your input folder. You could overwrite if you need to but not a great idea if this is your first time batch processing.

jstuartj


[This message has been edited by jstuartj (edited 02-01-2003).]