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Another hidden software marvel
November 6, 2007

Russell Brown is Adobe’s Senior Art Director. He’s also a master of Photoshop, an expert public speaker, a stand-up comedian, an excellent artist, and a software visionary. Brown’s work at Adobe has expanded the public’s knowledge of their products, particularly of Photoshop, and helped to make Adobe the preeminent software vendor for graphic arts, photography, and creative media.

Several years ago, Russell Brown realized that something was missing from Adobe Photoshop, and he set out to create it. What he wanted was a tool that could process, or reprocess groups of images, converting them from their existing format into another format. He worked with some of the engineers at Adobe to develop Dr. Brown’s Image Processor, a plug-in script that you could download from Russell’s web site and add to your copy of Photoshop. It was so successful that one version of Photoshop later, his Image Processor (they dropped his name from its title) was added to the shipping version of Photoshop.

It’s still there, thank goodness, and I use it often. “Hidden” away in the File menu under “Scripts” is the Image Processor. It’s a great time-saver and a workhorse of a tool that can take one, or a thousand photos and do something with them.


Over the weekend I photographed a friend’s wedding. I shot 364 photos on my Canon camera, and I downloaded them to my hard drive, and I built a web gallery so that everyone could see them (web galleries will be discussed in a future blog). Then I needed to make a CD with copies of the photos on it for the happy couple. They wanted JPEG; I shot camera Raw. So, it was time for the Image Processor to do its magic.

Last night I set-up the Image Processor to make JPEG images of the whole folder of wedding photos. And, while doing so, I changed the resolution of the resulting images to a more manageable size (they started as 12 MB camera Raw files; they end up as 1 MB JPEG files). When invoked, the Image Processor takes-off and processes each image. While running, Photoshop disables the display, which saves time, and you cannot use Photoshop for anything else while it's running. Depending on the size of your originals, this process can take quite a while, but that gives me a chance to make a cup of tea, write a blog, or play a game of Scrabble (I won! 299 to 292). It took about 15 minutes to process all 364 images to medium-resolution JPEG photos.

Some of the hidden features of the Image Processor are that if you have a mix of horizontal and vertical photos, you can resize them to the longest dimension by entering your desired long-dimension pixel count in both horizontal and vertical windows. Whichever is the longer dimension will define the conversion. And, if you need JPEGs at 500 pixels, PSDs at full-resolution, and TIFFs at 1600 pixels, the Image Processor will do all three – at the same time.

If you use Photoshop Actions, you can have the Image Processor carry-out an Action as it works, and you can choose to apply a copyright to each image, and either include (always!) the ICC profile, or not. When it’s finished, Image Processor puts the resulting images in a folder titled with the file type.

If you do any mass processing of images, this software tool is going to be your new best friend.

And, don’t miss Russell Brown’s online tutorials, available on his web site. He’s quietly working on the next Image Processor, or the new Russell Brown Tyrannosaurus Text (I made that up, though I’d like to see what he could do with it).

Posted by Brian Lawler on November 6, 2007 | Comments (0)