Photoshop and Illustrator automation

Dead Computer

So I have hundreds of .eps files in illustrator, I need to save them all as PNG-24s at 25% of their original size.

How could I automate this so I don't have to do each one individually?

An on top of that, I need to then take the PNGs and rehue them to several different color variations. How could I automate THAT so I don't have to do each one individually and rehue them consistently?

This is all in CS5

MagicToaster

In Photoshop, there is a window called Actions. You can set up so that it records your actions then you can have it run through those actions as many times as you need it.

Often times at work, I have to resize lots of files, here's how I do it:

• Open the Action Pallet (Windows/Action)
  
• Click on New Action, name your action for easy finding later.
  
• Press the record button at the bottom to start recording your movements. (Don't worry about doing it fast, its only recording the things you click on)
  
• Do your adjustments and save the file and close the document.
  
• Press stop.

Once you have it, you can simply press play or if you gave it a keyboard shortcut you can activate the action with it.

I'm not sure what you mean when you say re-hue a file. Can you be more specific as to how you're going to do this.

Dead Computer

MagicToaster wrote: »

In Photoshop, there is a window called Actions. You can set up so that it records your actions then you can have it run through those actions as many times as you need it.

Often times at work, I have to resize lots of files, here's how I do it:

• Open the Action Pallet (Windows/Action)
  
• Click on New Action, name your action for easy finding later.
  
• Press the record button at the bottom to start recording your movements. (Don't worry about doing it fast, its only recording the things you click on)
  
• Do your adjustments and save the file and close the document.
  
• Press stop.

Once you have it, you can simply press play or if you gave it a keyboard shortcut you can activate the action with it.

I'm not sure what you mean when you say re-hue a file. Can you be more specific as to how you're going to do this.

Well by re-hue I mean basically changing the colors of the image.

For instance, the image might be red, but I need variations of it in green and blue. I usually do this through the hue and saturation tools in Photoshop with the colorize option, but there might be a better way to do it.


Also, how will the action know what file to pick? I have to specify the file each time or can I have it just apply an action to every file in a directory?

MagicToaster

Dead Computer wrote: »

Also, how will the action know what file to pick? I have to specify the file each time or can I have it just apply an action to every file in a directory?

What I do is open all the files I need then I apply the actions one by one. I make sure to close the file before I press STOP so that every time press the action it closes it for me.

You still have to do a bit of manual labor, I don't know of any other way to do this.

As for the color change, I'm not sure if you can do that with the Actions.

Dead Computer

I think I actually found a way to run an action on multiple files, something called Batch Processing?

Regardless, I've hit a snag. I've recorded my action using the Save for Web.

Unfortunately, it seems like even though it resizes the image and selects the correct format, it doesn't actually save it for some reason. It stops right before the part where it's supposed to save and I have to hit the save button manually and save it to the directory I want, even though the action clearly shows that it already knows what directory it is supposed to save to. It's even supposed to close the file by itself, but it doesn't do it until I manually go in and save. Any idea what's going on?

MagicToaster

no clue. Sometimes the Actions don't work on some windows.

mehmehmeh

You can perform actions on an entire folder of files, file>automate>batch

Save for web is always treated as "save a copy as", so even after you use the save for web feature it will usually ask if you want to save your changes to the original file. so when you record your action make sure you don't hit stop until after you have properly closed the file, (probably clicked cancel for save changes)

one quirk is that the save for web seems to override any output destinations in the batch window. So where you recorded the "save for web" action will always the output folder for the action. I make sure to move everything out of that directory after i run a batch process.

edit:
folder_a- contains all the original files
folder_a_resize- will be where I want all the resized files
folder_output- where the "save for web"action was recorded to

run batch on folder_a, even if you put folder_a_resize as the output destination nothing will end up there following batch processing. Everything will be in folder_output. So after running the batch process, move all the files from folder_output to folder_a_resize.

Dead Computer

I'm not seeing automate under File

this is in illustrator though

Tofystedeth

You could use AutoIt to script it. Working with Adobe apps in AutoIt is sometimes a pain, since their menus and stuff are often really toolbars so don't return expected things*, but if you have the action already set up, you can simply have AutoIt open the files then start the action.

*One of example of a problem like this is a task I was automating in Acrobat Standard. It wouldn't give any kind of return or indication when each step of the task finished (which could take 2-3 minutes), so how I worked around it was having AutoIt send a minimize command, which Acrobat wouldn't process until it finished the task. AutoIt was able to detect the minimization, so that was it's cue to move to the next steps.

mehmehmeh

Yeah my instructions were for Photoshop and I don't have Illustrator on my computer right now. You would think they would be the same.

Here are adobe's instructions Which seems to to imply that the batch is located under the actions panel menu rater than the file menu in Illustrator.