Adjustments to a whole group of pictures in Photoshop at once?

[Steve Lambesis]

This might be a silly question, but figure if anyone knows how to do this, they are on this forum. I am shooting golf outings that have 100-150 golfers with one or two pictures for each player. We print them as we go, and with a little luck we have them done at the end of the event. I shoot digitally, and would like to be able to make some adjustments across the board for all pictures in the folder. Simple things like auto contrast and sharpness for example. Is there any way to do this in Photoshop? If not, is there another piece of software that can do that?
Thanks in advance,
Steve

[Ho]

If you mean you want to apply the same adjustments with the same settings to each image, then just compose an ACTION and run it in BATCH mode. See your manual or online help for details...

[Steve Lambesis]

I think I understand the batch mode... but I can't figure out how to put automated functions in the action palette. If I wanted to do auto contrast, sharpening tool and a cropping size for a batch of pictures, how would I create an action palette to do that?
Many thanks,
Steve

[Norbert Bissinger]

1) Make a new Folder and call it: Actions.
2) Start an action and open One picture from the series. It does not matter if the pictures are downloaded to the HD or they are on a compact flash card. When open Go to Image>Adjust>Auto Levels, then Image>Adjust>Auto Contrast, then Filter>Sharpen>Unsharp Mask. Set the Amount to 150%, the Radius to 1.0 and Threshold to 0.
3) Stop the Action.
4) Save the action in the folder you just made.

5) File>Automate>Batch. Under Play make shure that the Set and action are selected. In Source select Folder. Click Choose and select the Folder of your Images. Select Override Action "Open" Commands. In Destination Select Folder and select the Folder you want them saved to. It would be a good idea to save them to a previously made folder on your HD if you opened them from a Compact Flash card.
Or if they are already on the HD just select the same folder. Select Override "Save in" Commands. In File Naming select "Document Name + Extension.
5) Hit OK, sit back and let PS do the work.

It would be much better if you would use curves instead of Auto Leves, but it's OK if your exposures and White Balance are accurate.

You could also build into the action as a first step some kind of Resizing, go to Image>Image Size. Deselect Resample Image and set the Resolution to 240 ppi. This resolution is good enough for prints on an Inkjet printer.

[YrbkMgr]

Steve,

Just to clarify Norbert's point...

Actions are the mechanism by which a sequence of events can be recorded and played back in photoshop. The Action Pallet is the little window in PS that holds the actions - like the layers pallet. So you are not creating an action pallet, you are creating an action and it is (automatically) stored in the Action Pallet.

Batch is the mechanism used to play actions on multple files automatically.

So read about creating actions(analogous to recording your keystrokes). Then in the actions pallet, look at some of the ones that shipped with PS.

Open some dummy images and play with those - watch what they do, and you'll get the idea.