Automate Partial Cropping

[Scot Motzny]

I have about 500 pictures that I resized to 725 pixels wide and 72 DPI. These images now need to be resized to 467 pixels wide by 273 so they fit into the space allotted by my web designer. The issue however is that the photos are of varying different heights -some are portrait and some are landscape.

I need to take each image and put it onto a canvas 467 by 273 and then manually adjust the image up and down to get the best crop. The way I've been doing this is to open a blank image file of that size, opening my target image, resizing the target image to the proper width, dragging it to the blank image file, and moving it up/down to get the best crop.

Each time I do this, I have to tell PS to open the new image in a new window rather than the new "tab" view so I can drag it, which ads another couple of clicks.

I need to do this to about 500 images and was hoping I might be able to automate this to the point where all I have to do is adjust the image up/down and then save it.

Any help would be mucho appreciated.

Thanks!

[Yutosi]

It would be easy to automate if you didn't have to adjust the area being cropped manually. There's no way to automate that unless you want to always crop out the top edge or the bottom edge, or maybe if you sorted them into two folders, one for each crop edge.

You can save yourself some time by making an action to do the repetitive tasks, and you can solve that window vs. tab issue by simply right clicking the layer in tab mode and choosing Duplicate Layer... then selecting to duplicate it to the blank image.

If you need help making an action that will automate it for you let me know.

[Scot Motzny]

Okay. Thanks. I was able to automate the process so that I can just move the image up or down and then save it as a psd document (in case I need to crop it differently because someone doesnt like it). Anyway, I then save it as a jpg for upload to the website. I tried to automate this as well, but when I change folders, it saves it to the same folder. I want it to save it to the folder that the original picture came from.

Any suggestions?

[Tron]

Are you recording an action to do this?

You can do it two ways.

1. You can have the Save As --> PSD --> Save to Location and Save for Web and Devices --> JPG --> Save to Location as part of the action and it will put them all in the folders you choose when you make the actions.

or

2. You can not include the save step in your actions and then use [B File --> Automate --> Batch[/B] and set the Save steps there after your action is applied. this should let you save them to the original folders where the images were.

Hope that helps, let me know if it doesn't or if you have other questions.