How to automate Photoshop?

Hi - I've got around 700 photos which I took at a race event this weekend to edit. I want to be able to open, (and for example) adjust shadows by 10%, sharpen by 20% then save them all. Is it possible to automate this please and how?

Also, I want to crop the images to a ratio that matches the desktop proportions of (1280x1024, 1024x768, 800x600 etc...). How do I set the crop tool to do this but not loose any resolution please?

Thanks,
Dave

I'll go ahead with the 2nd question.
I'm not sure how huge your pix are but, if they are smaller than you wanted them to be, then the crop tool is not the solution. You can right click on the title bar of the image and adjust the image size, of course you'll loose some quality if you enlarge them too much than their original size.

1st question,
You can use Adobe Photoshop's Action to record all your actions and play them over and over on different photos/images. I'm not really familiar with using actions too, but you can use adobe help to know how to use them

Thanks for the reply.

I think I sussed the resizing thing... what I did was see how big the images from my camera are. 3072x2048 180dpi as it turns out. In the Crop tool Width & Height boxes I put 3.072cm and 2.048 cm with the Resolution box empty. What this does is keep the proportions of the picture and just chops out the unwanted bits. Try it, it seems to work.

Dave

To add some info to the last post, after you have created this action you can use it in:

File -> Auotomate -> Batch...

Here you can select in the set pulldown field your action, then fill out all other option accoarding to your wishes.

Walk away grab a beer, walk back after 5 minutes and...

Voila!!!!

(I suggest creating the images in a new folder, so do not overwrite the original ones. Better to be safe the sorry!)

Regards,

Sander Meilink