Spring 2008
Web Presentation
I really enjoy sharing my images with as many people as I can. Because of this I try to keep my website as up to date as possible and add new content on a weekly basis. However, the process of resizing images, adding borders or watermarks and saving for the web can often be an extremely time consuming process. I have tried to streamline the steps involved for updating a website to the greatest extent possible in the workflow described below. I hope you’ll find it helpful and that it will give you more time to get out and capture great images.
It’s All About Actions
The primary way to speed up your web presentation workflow is to write a Photoshop Action that you can play immediately after you are done editing and saving an image.
Here is a copy of the steps involved in my “save for web” action:
Once I am done editing any image in Photoshop and have renamed and saved the TIF file I run the action outlined above. Essentially it involves resizing the image (to 4 x 6 inches at 120 dpi), sharpening the images lightness channel using the unsharp mask filter, creating a background layer and expanding the canvas size, adding text and a drop shadow, and saving the file as a reduced size jpg in an appropriate folder.
Note: that you will also have to create a similar action for vertical photos and for any alternate crop ratios you may use. For example I also have an action set up for “panoramic” images.
A Tip: For the longest time I could not figure out a way to apply a background to my images and maintain the original file name when I re-saved the file. The problem was that I was saving the actual image on top of a separate background layer. To get around this problem I re-wrote the action to expand the canvas size of the image rather than pasting the image on to a separate layer. The result was that I no longer had to re-name any of my files for the web – a huge time savings!
Just as a side note I use Macromedia Dreamweaver to design my website. I find it very user friendly and easy to use with very little web based experience.