Image Processor

New to Photoshop CS2, Image Processor offers a quick way of saving up to three versions of the selected imagesa JPEG, a TIFF, and a Photoshop file, with each format in a separate subfolder. You can set different sizes for each format, and optionally, run an action and include a copyright notice. Figure 9-13 shows the Image Processor dialog box.

Figure 9-13. Image Processor

Let's look at the options.

• Open first image to apply settings is primarily useful for processing unedited images that require approximately the same treatment. When you run Image Processor, the first raw opens in Camera Raw. The settings you make there are applied to all the other images. These settings are used only by Image Processorthey aren't written to the image's metadata.

• Select location to save processed images lets you save the images either in the same folder, or in one that you designate here. In either case, if you've chosen multiple file formats, a subfolder is created for each file format.

• File Type lets you save any combination of JPEG, PSD, and TIFF, with the option to resize the image in any of the chosen formats.

• Preferences lets you choose an action that runs on all the processed images, lets you include copyright info if you haven't done so already, and gives you a choice as to whether or not to include the ICC profile in the images.

The settings shown in Figure 9-13 create a full-resolution TIFF, and a JPEG downsampled to a maximum dimension of 800 pixelsthe image's aspect ratio is always maintained. A sharpening action was applied to all the images, and I elected to include the ICC profiles. The images were saved in JPEG and TIFF subfolders inside the "Kauai Koi" subfolder.

One nifty feature of Image Processor is that it takes care of flattening and downsampling to 8-bit/channel automatically for the JPEGs while saving the TIFFs as layered 16-bit/channel images. So it's by far the quickest and easiest way to save a high-resolution TIFF and low-resolution JPEG version of the same imagesomething many of us need to do often.