Making Life Easier: Automatic Processing of Multiple Files

Every now and again I'll hear the problem over twitter: "I need to (something) (a big number of) files!!" Thankfully, both Adobe Photoshop (CS2 and above for this tutorial) and Photoshop Elements have built-in commands that enable you to automatically process a big (or even small) batch of files so you can do more important things than sit in front of a computer all day. I'll walk you through the easiest ways to do this. Take note that in Photoshop, there are more advanced ways to batch-process files, but for now we'll use the one that takes the least effort for basic tasks. Click here to go to the Elements tutorial.

Photoshop: Using the Image Processor

The Image Processor is a script included with Photoshop that enables you to automatically resize and save multiple files, with additional options if you want to make small adjustments. For this lesson, I'm going to process the folder I have above, containing large pictures of Prague.

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The Powerful Layer Mask Tool

Next to adjusting colors and contrast, the most-used tool for me would probably be the Layer Mask Tool. The Layer Mask is a method for making areas of a layer selectively transparent or opaque (and varying degrees of transparency in between). It's the tool that finds use for very fine adjustments to small areas of your image, to making composites of images -- everything from cheesy portraits inside a brandy snifter to amazing image transformations). Right now we'll deal with everything you need to know about the Layer Mask Tool. It's so threaded into the image-editing process that it has to be taught, I feel, before most anything else.

I'll start with an image with two layers. (Feel free to follow along or experiment by creating an image with any two layers you want to combine.) Here's the bottom layer:

and here's the top layer:

(You already know this is going to be cheesy.)

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