Slightly Remarkable

So, I take about 140 pictures on my digital camera, and I want to resize them all and apply the Unsharp Mask filter to get a crisper image. Opening each individual image (sequentially or simultaneously) is definitely out of the question. This is where Photoshop comes to the rescue (in more ways than one).

Open one of the pictures in Photoshop, and begin recording an Action (it’s basically the Adobe term for “macro”). You should be able to hit the “Actions” tab in your History/Actions/Tool Presets window to see the default Actions that come with Photoshop. All you have to do from there is hit the circle (record), resize the image to the dimensions you want, apply the Unsharp Mask filter, and then hit the square (stop) in the Actions window. Now that you’ve recorded the action, you can tell Photoshop to open a large number of images, run the specified Action, save the images (or copy them as changed to a new directory), and close them, all automatically.

To make Photoshop run a batch operation, go to File → Automate → Batch… Select the Set you saved your Action in, and then select the Action name from the drop down menu. You can play around with the options from there, but what I did was I picked a folder of images to change, left all boxes unchecked, and changed the Destination to a new folder (so that instead of editing the images, it opened copies, edited the copies, and then saved the copies to another folder on my computer, preserving the original images). Unless you opened, saved or closed the image while you were recording the Action, it’s very important that you do not check any of the boxes.

So there you have it. It’s very quick and simple, but hopefully it’ll help out some of you who had the same problem as I did. Figuring things out on your own isn’t always fun, especially when you’re pressed for time!