6 Totally Essential Photoshop Skills Even Your Mom Should Know

Posted 03/11/2009 at 11:00am | by Florence Ion

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For more than a decade, Adobe Photoshop has been the de facto image-editing program used by professionals and art students alike. But there are plenty of casual users who only dabble with Photoshop for simple tasks, such as photo resizing and cropping -- oblivious to the sheer power of Photoshop's graphics manipulation abilities. These decidedly non-power users (and we know some of you are included in this group) can do so more with this versatile program -- and we're here to show you how. 

Whether you've just installed Photoshop for the first time or know your away around a the Tools toolbar, we put together a few of the most essential Photoshop skills to get you started on your photo editing endeavors. Before you know it, you'll be fixing up your grandmother's torn-up black and white wedding photos and airbrushing the heck out of yourself for your Facebook photo. 

Create an Action Script to resize a large batch of photos

Understanding how to record an action script is vital to becoming a Photoshop power user. Actions can help increase productivity by using prerecorded macros to emulate repetitive tasks, allowing you to step away while your computer automatically gets the job done. In this particular tutorial, we'll show you how to resize a large batch of photos, but you can record virtually any action that may be neccessary to your Photoshop needs, including color correction, level adjustment or even applying filters.

1. Before you start this project, we suggest that you gather your images from their respective locations and place them all in one folder. This way, it will make it much easier to save a huge batch of images and access them afterward.

Fire up Photoshop and open up a photo from the set you’ve previously isolated. At this point, we only need one photo to record the action.

2. Go to Window - Actions, or use the shortcut keys Alt + F9. Click the “New Action” button. A dialog box will pop up asking you to give it a name. You also have the option to set the action as one of your defaults or assign it a function key.

3. Press the red circle in the actions palette and get ready to record. Remember that everything you do from this point on is tracked and added to the new action, so make sure that any tool you utilize follows in the precise order you'd want your macro to emulate.

Resize the photos to your desired width and height, then Save for Web... and select the file type you would like to save your image as. We suggest that you save your photos as high resolution JPEGs for use on the web, or otherwise, PNG.

4. Close your image and select the Stop symbol on the Actions palette. Your Macro should be all set for your batch of photos. Locate the folder where you stored your photos beforehand and load them all up in Photoshop.

5. Go to File – Automate – Batch; a new dialogue window will open up. Under Play – Set, which should automatically set to Default Actions, select the name of the Action you just created.

Click for a thorough view of the Photoshop palette.

Under Source, make sure that the option Open Files is selected. Destination should be set to none, since you’ve already recorded that in your action.  Click OK, sit back, and observe your macro in action.

Alternatively, you can manually set a destination for your resized images, and use the File Naming section of the Batch Process window to add prefixes, suffixes, or sequential numbers to your newly resized images. If you do this, make sure to check the "Over Action 'Save As' Commands" box as well.