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I have a collection of shots from the same session in RAW and want to covert all of them to JPG. Each one should have a curve applied, then be scaled and sharpened using the same settings.
What is the best way to do this? Can I automate PhotoShop (or alternative) to perform the same steps over a number of pictures?
Open your folder containing the photographs in Adobe Bridge, then in the menu go: "Tools" -> "Photoshop" -> "Image Processor". (Entries translated.)
Set your JPEG quality and maximum resolution per side (aspect ratio will be retained), click go and wait.
Note: Bridge comes with Photoshop for those who do not know that.
Also, if you want to apply similar settings to all photographs, you can copy over settings in Bridge. Right click the RAW and it is an option in the second level of the menu.
Aperture 3 could be used for batch conversion. You import the RAW pictures into a library. When importing you could have a set of pre-defined settings. Choose Import Settings -> Adjusment Preset. Select the preset you like. If there is no one that you like, you could edit/create your own preset. During the import process it is also possible to do a backup of your files, which I think is handy. Of course you could do simple things like renaming pictures etc. When you have them all imported, you could export them at once or apply your adjustment.
The process is semi-automatic, you will have to select the settings before import and the choose your settings when exporting. If you want to automate everything, I suggest using the Automator application that is provided with Mac OS X.
I use Aperture 3 for batch processing and a like a lot. It is cheaper than PhotoShop. It is available for Mac OS X.
As I don't have any extra photo editing programs I used iPhoto to do this. Open iPhoto with the option key held down. This gives you the option to create a new library. Create a temporary one somewhere where it will be easy to find and delete it later. Import all the Raw Pictures into the new library. Export them all in the required format. Quit and delete the library.
On OSX, there is a fast, free and easy option. Go into terminal and navigate to the folder containing your RAW photos. For Nikon NEF images, run this command:
# Convert RAW to JPG
for i in *.NEF; do sips -s format jpeg -s formatOptions 70 $i --out $i.jpg;done
The -s formatOptions setting specifies the JPG quality.
Man for sips here: https://ss64.com/osx/sips.html
Also useful, if your files are in nested folders, you can run this first to bring everything up to your current folder:
# Move children to current folder
find . -mindepth 2 -type f -print -exec mv {} . \;
# Remove Empty Folders
rm -r -- ./*/
You should be able to do this with Adobe Camera RAW. It's very fast and you can set some processing settings on it.
Drag and drop all of your RAW files to Photoshop and they'll open in Adobe Camera RAW. You can set the size and colour setting using the link at the bottom/middle of the screen.
Select all the images in the sidebar and apply the curves and processing settings you want and then use the 'Save Images...' button in the bottom left.
ACDSee Pro is a good tool. It is available for Windows and Mac OS X. I used this for many years. It has good batch processing engine. It is very handy to do these type of batch conversion, batch re-size, batch rename, batch color correction etc.
You can do so with Digikam.
Go to Tools > Batch Raw converter and add the files, then apply your curves and the like. (Tried with 2.0.0-rc, newest version is 2.5.0.)
On windows for Canon: Digital Photo Professional. GUI application.
On Linux for any camera: dcraw + the ImageMagick package and a little work in shell.
For quickly converting and resizing images I use Faststone - very quick and freeware.
I would go with Adobe Lightroom. You can process catalog, set of photos or photo by clicking "File > Export.." and set not only dimension of photos but also add watermark, sharpen them for printing or screen, rename and much more.
It's also great tool for editing photos and applying same styles for all photos take literally seconds.
You can check exporting video here.
