Expert: LizaL - 6/1/2005

Question
Hi Liza,

I consider myself an advanced Photoshop user but actions is one area that always confuses me, mostly because I rarely use it.

I recently have been digitizing a lot of old photos for putting onto CD. I realized I had stupidly been saving a lot of them as progressive JPGs instead of standard (due to doing a lot of talking on the phone whilst dealing with this mundane task!). This prevents them from being readable by my DVD player. I therefore want to resave all of the photos I've scanned in this format as standard. An action would clearly be the best way to go but I'm always fuzzy about how to do this type of batch task that involves a "Save As" function. I always seem to end up overwriting the same file again and again, or only successfully perform the task on one file, or...

Can you help me?

Thanks a lot,

Steve

Answer
Hi Steve,

I would have posted back last night, but occasionally this site just doesn't want to cooperate... <grrrrr>

ANYway! You've hit on something I absolutely hate to use, ha ha! Actions are great, and I love using those, per se, but it's the ones that involve Save and Save As that throw me every time. But if you understand that Actions tie in with Batch processing, it makes it a little easier.

Like you, I'm an advanced user, but I'm not too proud to admit that I have trouble with these actions that require saving. But hopefully this will help:

1. For starters, put all the files you want to redo in the same folder. Also make an empty folder, which will be your desintation folder. In my example, I put 4 small progressive JPEGs in a folder called "old." My destination folder is named "new."

Something else I did that will later tie into the Batch process is that I named my files 1, 2, 3 and 4. Photoshop will take #1, work on it with my action, then save it accordingly, and move on to #2. Naming the files with numbers has always seemed the most logical way, to me, when having to use these tricky Save and Override options.

2. The key lies in setting up the action in the Actions palette, then applying this action through the Batch process, which as you know is found under the File pulldown menu, then the Automate submenu.

3. My action consists of this:
http://little-works.com/all_experts/action_steps.png

and I named it "standard."

The steps don't show it, but when I did the Save command, I did the regular Save (not Save for Web), and designated the newly-saved file to be Standard instead of progressive. (Of course, you could do Save for Web just as easily; it doesn't matter here.)

4. Under Batch, my setup looks like this:
http://little-works.com/all_experts/batch_commands.png

Note that I checked both Ovverride options. Also, here's where the number file names come into play: Photoshop will save and open according to serial #1 -- then, seeing a sequential number, will move on to #2, and so on.

I've done this for contact sheet booklets that have as many as 50 pictures in them, and using numbers for the file names has always seemed intuitive.


Anyway, this worked for me, LOL! If it doesn't work for you, I'll save my actions as a Droplet and email it to you. So let me know what happens and if all else fails, we can try that.

Hope this helps! And again, sorry I wasn't able to answer sooner.

Lisa