Buried in the menus of Photoshop CS2 is a great little program that you might have overlooked.  It’s called the Image Processor and is accessible two ways: directly from Photoshop via File > Scripts > Image Processor, or through Bridge from Tools > Photoshop > Image Processor.  Regardless of the method you use to navigate, the same menu box will appear:

If you look carefully at the choices available you’ll see that the Image Processor basically lets you combine the features of a batch program with an action.  Whoa!  This is worth a closer look.

Suppose you need three different versions of an image: a PSD version to work on in Photoshop, a JPEG version to email, and a quick TIFF version for client usage.  You could open the image and do a “save as” for each of these file formats.  But with just a few mouse clicks the Image Processor will do all of this for you.  In fact it can take an entire folder of images, convert them to the different file formats, resize the images to the dimensions you specify for each file, make a new directory folder for each file type, and store the resulting files.  In addition you also have the choice of running a pre-recorded action on all the files.

All by itself this is a pretty neat processor.  But combined with the new Bridge feature introduced with CS2 these are some possibilities that I really like.  Here’s one way I use the Image Processor in my workflow.

I’m shooting RAW files with my Nikon D2x.  I’ll keep some of the images for my own files and some will be sent to my stock agencies.  In Bridge I open a folder of my RAW images and select the “keeper” files by tagging them with a star rating, one star for images I want to keep and two stars for those I plan on sending to my agencies.  Then I use the Filter feature to show only one (or the other) of these tagged groups of images.  I do a “select all” followed by “open in Camera Raw” (note that I am not opening these directly into Photoshop).  I then tweak the images in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR), either on an individual image basis or by selecting several (just control-click to select) and synchronizing to apply specific ACR settings to a group of images.  Finally I click on “done” to apply these settings, again without opening the images into Photoshop.  The ACR settings are applied to all the images and I’m returned to Bridge. 

I don’t automatically work on all these converted RAW files in Photoshop.  In truth I probably will never do so as I don’t have either the time or inclination.  In the “my file” selection I’ll Photoshop images as I need them, either for submission to clients or for prints.  With the “agency” selection I’ll finalize only those that my agency actually selects to keep.  Why do any extra work?

Here’s where the Image Processor comes into play.  For “my file” images I set the Image Processor to convert to PSD documents only.  As to a destination I usually save back into the same folder as the original RAW files as there is no danger of overwriting.  Now I can open these converted files at my leisure and work on them in Photoshop.

But the “agency” files are done differently.  I specify I want two things to happen:  I want to convert the RAW files, now with the ACR settings applied, into PSD documents (although let me repeat again that I’m not going to work on them at this time), and simultaneously to small JPEG versions.  Why the latter?  I will post these JPEGs to web gallery pages, also created directly in Photoshop (File > Automate > Web Photo Gallery), so that my agency can quickly pick images.  These pages will not appear on my web site index for the casual viewer to see.  I’ll email directions for these pages to my agency, then pull the pages once the agency has emailed me their choices.  Only then do I open the PSD files they want and actually work in Photoshop.

Here’s the Image Processor setup I use for “agency” files.

Note that the Image Processor will open my RAW files through the ACR converter, then do two things.  It will save the files as PSD versions, creating a subfolder labeled PSD within the Agency folder I have created, while at the same time making JPEGs sized to a maximum 600 pixels in any one direction and saving then in a JPEG subfolder it creates in the same Agency folder as the PSD files. All this with only a few mouse clicks!  Just in passing you might notice that I’m not converting the JPEGs to sRGB.  My agencies use calibrated monitors so everything they see is in Adobe RGB.

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The Image Processor, originally developed by Russell Brown, has actually been around for a while, although it was not included within Photoshop until CS2 came out.  If you’re running Photoshop CS you can download Dr. Brown’s Image Processor 2.3, a Javascript utility from www.russellbrown.com/tips_tech.html.

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