How do you tackle having to correct, sharpen, or otherwise edit massive numbers of images? For even the most expert Photoshop user, such a process can consume valuable time and resources. If you or your designers are spending hours making the same repetitious adjustments to hundreds of image files, this Web Design Wednesday has a helpful tip for making the process much faster and easier: automating your Photoshop actions.

Frequently, my own Los Angeles website designers will need to make the same size reductions, color corrections, and other edits to dozens of images for time-sensitive projects, so they are very resourceful with practical shortcuts. However, you need not be a design professional to learn and enjoy the ease of automating actions to save you monotonous busy work, whether you’re updating your personal website or your Flickr page. Let's say you’ve got to resize fifty images; automating lets you do it with one and save the parameters of the action to apply to the other forty-nine.

The option to automate your actions is already in your Photoshop and quick to access. Go to Command Central, and then to your Actions Palette (next to your History). A fly-out menu will appear and prompt you to Create, Load, Edit, Replace, Reset, or Clear actions. You will save your actions in sets of commands in macro form, and can save them in folders categorized by the type of actions a given set covers for convenient reference in the future. Create a new action, name it, assign it a function key, and you’re ready to come back to it again and again. Additionally, your actions can work in different versions of Photoshop, and can transition from Macs to PC's and vice versa. If you’d like to learn more about how to put automated actions to work and speed up your professional or personal design projects, here are some excellent tutorials.

Thanks for reading. Jason.
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