Creating Actions With Conditionals

Photoshop’s adoption of conditional actions is quite lame—there’s only one true conditional available, and it’s buried deep in the File menu, where only die-hard power users will ever find it. ImageReady, however, can create conditionals with a lot more options and in a more robust interface. This How-To will demonstrate how to create a conditional action in ImageReady and apply it to a batch of Photoshop images.

IT’S NOT EASY

Adobe does not make it easy to apply ImageReady actions within Photoshop—they’re incompatible. You can’t import a set of ImageReady actions into Photoshop: saving ImageReady actions creates an .isa file, which Photoshop can’t read. Likewise, Photoshop actions export as an .atn file, unreadable by ImageReady. I don’t know why this is, but it often seems Adobe’s product teams are working independently and are therefore unaware of the innovations each of them are doing (Photoshop’s scrubby sliders should be in all the CS2 apps, but it’s not and it drives me crazy).

DROPLETS ARE THE WAY TO GO

One feature that is shared by the Actions palette in both applications is the creation of droplets, mini-applications that will process an image or images with a single action or multiple actions. That’s what we’re going to do in this How-To tutorial. Consider we have a batch of several images of varying sizes; our objective is to size them down so the width is 640 pixels or lower or the height is 480 pixels or lower—a standard size for images on the web.

Step 1: Open a new file in ImageReady (File –> New… or Cmd-N). It doesn’t matter what size it is, as long as it’s open.

Step 2: In the Actions palette, click the Create New Action button at the bottom and create a new action titled “640×480 resize”. Click Record to create the action and begin recording your steps.

Figure 1: The flyout menu in the Actions palette.

Step 3: In the Action palette flyout menu, select Insert Conditional… (see Figure 1) to bring up the Conditional dialog box (Figure 2). Match the settings shown in Figure 2, which basically tells ImageReady to execute the next step in the action if image width is over 640 pixels. Click OK.

Figure 2: The Conditional dialog box.

Step 4: Create the next step by selecting Image –> Image Size… and setting image width to 640 pixels. Be sure Constrain Proportions is checked: it will keep your images proportional when you resize them, and even though keeping it checked resizes your image’s height it will not apply to the action because you didn’t input the pixel height manually.

Step 5: Repeat Step 3 to bring up the Conditional dialog box once more and apply the settings seen in Figure 3. This will check the image to see if its height is more than 480 pixels, and execute the next step accordingly.

Figure 3: The settings to change the image height.

Step 6: Repeat step 4, this time changing the image height to 480. In the Action Options within the Image Size dialog box, be sure “Fit Image By” is set to Height, or the Actions palette will record the width change instead of the height change. These Action Options are found only in ImageReady and are designed for actions like this one. You can also check “Do Not Enlarge” to ensure the image is not increased in size, but our conditionals are designed to do this for us.

Step 7: Click the Stop Recording button. Go to the Optimization palette and select the setting you want the images to be optimized at. Unfortunately ImageReady actions cannot save working files, only optimized files in the usual JPEG, GIF or PNG format. You can’t even add File commands, such as Save or Close, to ImageReady actions like you can in Photoshop. ImageReady actions are designed to optimize images, not edit working images.

Step 8: Select the action “640×480 resize” and in the flyout menu select Create Droplet…. Save the droplet to your desktop (the icon is shown in Figure 4).

Figure 4: The finished droplet.

You’re done! This droplet will resize images proportionally so they are either 640 pixels wide or 480 pixels tall, whichever comes first. And ImageReady droplets will process not just web images (JPEG, GIF and PNG) but also Photoshop EPS, Photoshop (.psd) and TIFF files, the three big file formats. It cannot do PDF files.

CONCLUSION

I find this solution to be something of a hack—Photoshop isn’t really involved in the procedure at all, and working with ImageReady actions forces you to save your images for the web. Some wouldn’t even consider it a Photoshop technique at all but an ImageReady technique, and it’s true that the images you get in the end are suitable mostly for the web. But it’s a workaround that gets conditional actions into the hands of Photoshop users for Photoshop files, and it’s likely there’ll be a situation in the future where this technique is a time-saver.