| Prep Your Photos for the Web | |
Introduction > Photoshop Prep > Batch Processing
If you take a lot of pictures in portait orientation, the images will need to be rotated.
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Rotating an image in Photoshop is a simple menu command:
- Open the image you want to rotate.
- Go to Image -> Rotate Canvas -> 90° CW
CW stands for clockwise. If you used a digital camera this is most likely the direction you need to go. If not, just choose the CCW (counter-clockwise) option from the same sub-menu.
The next step in prepping your images should be to crop and resize them. When you're putting your images on the Web, it's important to keep the images as small as possible so they will download faster. By cropping your photos of any unneccessary elements, your viewers can focus on only the important parts of your picture, and you'll reduce the file size as well.
Photoshop's crop tool is hidden under the rectangular marquee tool in version 5.5 and earlier. Click on the toolbar button and hold down for the pop-up. In versions 6 and up it has its own place in the toolbox and a shortcut key of C.
The
crop tool is the farthest tool on the right. To use it, just
click and drag a rectangle surrounding the area you want to
crop.
When you release the mouse button, you'll see a dashed line marquee with selection "handles" on the corners and the middle of each side. You can hold your cursor over these handles and drag them to adjust the size of your selection. When the marquee is where you want it, double click inside the marquee and the image will be cropped.
To resize the image, go to Image -> Image Size. For the Web, you should set your resolution to to 72 dpi and use pixels for the dimensions.
Remember to use the Unsharp Mask filter after resizing your images since resizing always results in some blurring. You can reach the Unsharp Mask filter in Photoshop by going to Filter -> Sharpen -> Unsharp Mask.
If you have several images to rotate, resize or sharpen, you can record an action and use the batch command to process an entire folder of images without repeating these steps for each image. Continue on to the next page to learn how to record an action and use the batch command. My example is for rotating images, but you can use actions and the batch command for any number of tasks.
Images: Copyright ©1999-2000, S. Chastain, unless otherwise noted.
