[Bart Smastard]

My wife is doing some work from home involving uploading images to a website for promotional products. For reasons unknown some images with a transparent (white) background when viewed on the Mac have a green background after being uploaded (using CyberDuck). As I said, this issue only occurs with some images, others with transparent/white background remain the same after upload.

I have found that I can fix the problem by using Photoshop to change the mode (under the Images menu) from CMYK to RGB and then saving the modified image and uploading again.

I guess the root of the problem is the differences between CMYK and RGB (the website obviously prefers RBG).

So why am I asking for help when I already know the answer? Because there's hundreds of the buggers and we'd like to change them to RGB in a batch. Can it be done with an Apple Script or an application, or even within Photoshop?

Any kind of assistance will be greatly appreciated... and result in brownie points for me

EDIT: A bigger problem is resizing images to 80KB. There's many hundreds of images that are well over this size. I've tried using AppleScript and a few image processing batch apps but all can only rescale the pixels which doesn't always guarantee that the file size will be below 80kb.

What we want is a way of resizing them down to 80kb with any of the guess work. Any great, quick and easy ideas?

[benda]

Do you have any examples that you can show us?

What format are you saving the files in? I'm pretty sure JPEGs can't have transparent areas.

It's probably best to only use RGB images for online viewing. You could record a new action then run a batch to change them all from within Photoshop.

1. Open the Actions Palette
2. Choose New Action from the Actions Palette Menu, name it To RGB
3. Press the Stop Button on the Actions Palette
4. With To RGB still selected choose Insert Menu Item from them Actions Palette Menu
5. Select Image->Mode->RGB colour, click Ok
6. Select File->Automate->Batch
7. Choose To RGB in the Play area
8. Set up your source files and destination settings
9. Press Ok and you're done!

This assumes that the Working RGB Colour Space you're using is what you want to use for the web files. If you also need to change the profile then set up your action to Convert to Profile rather than simply change the colour mode.

[tanguero]

In photoshop open the actions window.
Create and name a new action, hit record, open one of your images and convert it, save it into a new folder and close it, stop recording.

Make sure that all of your images to convert are in one folder, in potoshop go to File - automate - batch, in the popup menu chose your action and fill in the fields.
I can't remember exactly how to set the "override save" option but you should get it with some trial and error.

Good luck

Ha ha, benda beat me!

[Bart Smastard]

Thanks benda, that sounds like just the trick we're looking for.

Can a Photoshop action also change the file size? If so we're sorted

[benda]

Photoshop actions can do just about everything.

Like tanguero says, just record everything you do to one image into an action then you can repeat it for everything else. Image size can be a little tricky…particularly if you're dealing with different image sizes and a mixture of portrait/landscape orientations.

[Bart Smastard]

Maybe treating portrait and landscape images separately will be the way to go.

I'll give it a go.

Thanks for all your help guys.

[SyncMan]

Photoshop actions FTW, and you can them into a droplet app to use over and over again to save the day.

[grfxninja]

If the images are all the same size (pixels - either portrait or landscape) then you can use the "save for web" (or "Save for Web & Devices" if using CS3) option under the file menu to choose a specific percentage rather than pixel value.
That way it won't matter the orientation of the image.

Also, if you use the "Save for Web" option rather than the above methods, there is no need to convert it to RGB first as PS will do it automatically.

So:
Open an image
Press Record on the Actions Palette - Name the action
File > Save for Web: Choose your settings, i.e. Jpeg High. Go to Image size at the bottom right of screen and choose a percentage. Hit the apply button, then look at the output size displayed on the left of the window at the bottom. Tweak the percentage until you have a suitable size.
Save it where you want to - Don't save over the original file. If the images are in a folder, most times I will create a folder within it called web and save to this.
Press "Stop" on the Actions palette

File > Automate > Batch…
Choose your source folder. Choose your Destination folder.
Click the option to override "Save As" commands
Hit OK. Go chuck the kettle on, and it should be done when you get back

HTH