Chapter 9. Exploiting Automation: Working Smarter, Not Harder

The goal of doing all the work I've discussed so far in this book is to set up your raw images with the correct Camera Raw settings and the right metadata so that you can produce deliverable processed images with the minimum amount of effort. The minimum amount of effort, in this case, means taking full advantage of Photoshop's rich automation features, so that you can simply press a button, walk away, and let the computer do your work for you.

One of the great things about a computer is that once you've made it do something, you can make it do that something over and over again, exactly the same way, automatically, without coffee or bathroom breaks. Tapping the power of automation is key to building an efficient workflow, so in this chapter I'll show you how to leverage the work you've done in Bridge and Camera Raw to produce deliverable images in a variety of formats.

Bridge serves as command central for all the operations I'll discuss in this chapter. They all boil down to a two-step process.

• You select the images that you want to process in Bridge.

• You run one of the options from Bridge's Tools>Photoshop menu to produce converted images. (When you want to use images selected in Bridge as source, you must call the automations from Bridge rather than Photoshop.)

The Photoshop submenu offers a variety of useful routines for creating images in a deliverable form, but by far the most powerful and flexible is the Batch command.