Subtitles of the Movie

Under the File menu, Photoshop has a very interesting item called Automate. Let's go to File menu>Automate, and we have several different options here. I've already talked about how to create a droplet. So you can see that movie to understand basically how the Batch function works. I'll bring up that Batch function, and what the Batch does is it wants to play an action that I've created. And I created a very simple action to demonstrate this. And the action is to flip an image and resize it to 100 pixels. So that's the action. You can choose an individual action from any of your currently open action sets, and I've created my own action set. And within that I have one of four actions to choose from. And I'm going to choose my flip/100 pixels. For destination, for Source, choose if you want have the Batch function look at a particular folder. Or if you have several files open, you can simply choose Opened Files. And then for Destination, similarly I could choose to save in to another folder or save over these items, or save into a separate folder. Or for now I'm going to choose None, just so it does the action but doesn't save them. So I'll click OK, and the Batch will run this function on all of the pictures in a folder that I've told it to look at. So it's opening the file, flipping it and resizing it to 100 pixels wide. So if you have to do a lot of image processing, or I should say do image processing over a lot of images, this is a great feature. And this is related to creating a droplet. But the only big difference here is that it doesn't write out the actual droplet. It simply runs the action over several images. So there we go; I've immediately created or image edited 6 pictures by using the Batch command. There's another cool item that we could choose to use under Automate. Go to File>Automate, and one of the options is Contact Sheet. And if you are familiar with that term, it comes from the world of photography. It allows you to create a sheet of images, of small thumbnail images. And so the way this works is very much like the Batch. [It] asks you to choose a folder, and I've already told it to use the folder on my desktop called batch.test. Click on the Choose button, and it brings up this open dialog box. And all I need to do is to select the folder you want, and maybe it's in another folder, so you might have to navigate. And with it selected, click the Choose button. And now notice it has the path appear of which folder. And if it has sub-folders, you might want to choose Include All Subfolders. You can design how big you want your contact sheet to be, and also design how big you want your thumbnails to be. And currently it's going to create 5 columns and 6 rows, making each of my images a little bit smaller than an inch. Use Filename As Caption will do just that - it will add the file name as a caption underneath the image, and you can choose what font you want, and what size. So I'll click OK. And this is a great way to show somebody a collection of pictures, or if you are a photo editor to create an instant contact sheet based on Photoshop files. So here's my final contact sheet, and I'll zoom in to 100%. And you can see it did a pretty nice job of creating a small thumbnail, and adding the text of the name underneath it. Finally I want to show you Picture Package, and that's another feature we have under Automate. You might have seen this when you ordered pictures, in sort of a high school photo format. Gives you two basic options: one to choose which picture you want to create a picture package out of. So I'll select the image and I'll use the Porsche image. And then you can choose from one of the many options for laying out. So I'll say 4 pictures, and make each of them 3 1/2 by 5 inches. And you can see to the right here my preview shows me how the picture package is going to design the image. Choose what kind of resolution you want, and what color mode you want, and click OK. And Photoshop will run this little canned script creating a custom picture package for you to print out. And there you have it. Here's my picture package ready for printing. It's very cool. There are several other options we have under Automate. [I] just wanted to show you those. [A] very powerful collection of scripting ability.