260 Batch process images

- [Instructor] I have an InDesign document here with a bunch of pictures, some photos, some illustrations, and I need to change all of the photos in the same way, and I really don't want to have to open and edit them one at a time. That would be painfully time consuming, not to mention boring. So, I want to be able to batch process them. And in this movie, I'm going to show you how to do just that really easily. Now, this could be almost any kind of edit, maybe I want to make them all lighter, or convert them to grayscale, or maybe put a dark vignette around the edges, or re-size them to a particular resolution, or maybe apply a watermark.

If you can do it to one image in Photoshop, you can probably apply it as a batch process to all of your images. So here in my InDesign document, I'm going to open the Links panel, and you can see that I have a bunch of images listed here. Actually, I'm going to go to the Links panel menu, and I'm going to choose Panel Options down here at the bottom, and I'm going to turn on the option called Color Space. When I click OK, you'll see that it adds a color space column over here inside the panel. Let's go ahead and make this panel a little bit wider, so we can see that better.

So this is really helpful. It shows me some of these images are RGB, there's one CMYK, and there's some that are blank. Blank means it's a vector image, like a PDF or an EPS, or in this case, a native Illustrator file. Now I'm not going to worry about those right now. Now in this document, what I want to do is convert all of these images to CMYK. And now don't get me wrong, I do believe in using RGB images inside my InDesign documents. It's generally a much better workflow than placing CMYK images.

And I talk about that in great detail in several of my courses here in the online training library, such as InDesign Color Management, but there are some times when you're working with someone, like maybe a printer, and they insist that you send them your native InDesign document, along with all of your images already converted to CMYK. Just for the sake of argument here, let's say that we want to convert all of the RGB images to CMYK. How am I going to do it? Now, normally I would simply export a PDF out of InDesign and I would convert to CMKY during that process.

But as I said, in this case I actually need to convert the images themselves. So, I'm going to use my two trusty friends, Photoshop and Bridge. First, let's switch to Bridge, and I want to locate that InDesign document. In this case, it's right here on my desktop. Now if you squint, you'll see a little chain icon in the upper right corner. That icon means that Bridge can see that there are a linked images inside this InDesign document.

So, if I right click on this document, or a control + click with a one button mouse, I see a menu that includes, check this out, Show Linked Files. This is a secret hidden feature, but it's really cool because when I select that, Bridge shows me all of the images that are inside that InDesign document. You can see the JPEGs, the Photoshop files, vector art, everything. Now, these files might actually be scattered all over my hard drive or maybe out on a server. I don't know, it doesn't matter.

Bridge hasn't actually moved anything. It's just showing me the images themselves. So next, I can come over here to the Filter panel over here on the left, and I can choose the file types that I want to affect. In this case, I want all my JPEG files, and let's grab the Photoshop documents too. I'm not going to change the Illustrator documents because those are vector images. So, now that I'm showing just the images that I want to change, I'll go up to the Tools menu, come down to Photoshop, and then choose Batch.

I should point out that if I were doing something where I needed to re-size the images, I might use Image Processor instead, that's very cool. But in this case, all I'm going to be doing is applying an action, so I'm going to use Batch. Now, you can see up in the upper left corner here, that it's going to play a particular action on all of my images. And I don't have time to get into how to make an action in Photoshop. There are a lot of movies in the online training library about how to make actions, but it took me like two minutes to make one that converts my images to CMYK in the particular color space that I want.

So I put that inside my folder of actions, called David's Actions, and I can choose that here. Now, just in case there's some weirdness with any of the images or my Photoshop setup, I'm going to turn on these two Suppress checkboxes down here because I don't want my batch process to stop for minor alerts. Then, up here in the Destination popup menu, I could choose Save and Close, but I don't really want to do that because that would overwrite my original RGB images, and that's a bad thing.

We don't want to mess up our originals because then there's no going back. So instead, I'll choose Folder, and then I'll click Choose, and I'm going to make a new folder or choose a folder that I want all of these images to go into. I'm going to click the New Folder button and I'm gonna call this cmyk images. Now I'll just click the Choose button and this batch is going to grab each of those images, convert them with the action, and save them inside that folder.

Now the Batch dialog box also let's you set the naming of your images, but we want to leave this the way it is because we want to make sure each file is named exactly the same. We don't want to go changing the file names. I'll show you why in a minute. Okay, that's it. Let's try it out. I'm going to click OK and you can see that Photoshop starts opening each of those images, converting them, and saving them. Obviously, if you have hundreds of images this might take awhile, but here it goes really quickly, and now we're done.

And now I'll switch back to InDesign, and of course, these images are still RGB because there's one more step. We need to tell InDesign to relink to the folder that we just made full of those CMYK images. So to do that, I'm going to select all the RGB images inside the Links panel. I'm going to make this easy on myself by grouping all of the RGB images together, and I can do that by clicking on this little format icon at the top of the column. There we go. Now I can select the first one, scroll down, and then shift + click on the last one.

That selects all of the items in that list. Now while those are selected, I'll just head up to the Links panel menu, and I'm going to choose the item called Relink to Folder. I need to navigate into the folder that I just created, and I wanna come down here and make sure Match same Filename and extension is selected. Remember when I said the images have to have exactly the same name? This is why. Finally, I'll click the Choose button and InDesign goes and relinks all of those images for me inside this document.

Check it out here in the Links panel. They're all CMKY now. Like I said, this technique of using Bridge and Photoshop actions can be used for almost any kind of image processing that you need to do on a bunch of pictures at the same time. Now InDesign is awesome, right? But it's even better when you connect it with Photoshop using Bridge.