[Tutorial]How to Use Photoshop's Batch Process to Recolor Your Icons

[Oyabun]

This tutorial is for Adobe Photoshop users.

Adobe Photoshop has the ability to "record" changes made to an image, as i will explain here. This will allow you to recolor only one icon, and with one click, let photoshop make all of the changes to the other icons for you.

It may look like a lengthy process, but once you get used to doing it, it will take you less than a minute to recolor all of your icons

1. Open your topmenu_plugin.rco in Zinga's rco editor.

In this case, i will be editing RaiderX's blue psp suite icons.



2. Create a folder where you want to extract the icons.

Select extract all

(after extracting, delete everything except the bitmaps you are going to recolor)



3. Browse to the folder where you extracted the icons, copy and paste one of the icons to your desktop, and open it in Photoshop.



4. In the History/Actions window, click on the little folder at the bottom of the pane. this will create a new set



In this case, i will name the set "Recolor"



"Recolor" , will now show up in the actions pane



5. Now you will need to create a new "Action"
click on the icon to the right of the little folder in the history/actions pane



In this case i will name the new action "Invert Recolor"



After creating the new action, click Record

Photoshop will now begin "recording" any changes you make to the icon

In this case, i will invert the icon, and change the Hue/Saturation to recolor it.



after making changes to the icon, save and close it.

6. In the actions pane, you will see your new set and action you created. it has recorded the changes you made to the icon (Invert & Hue/Saturation).

now you want to stop the "recording".

click on the little square icon all the way to the left in the actions pane



7. Now we will let photoshop automatically recolor all of the icons for you.

click on file, scroll down to automate, and click on batch.



8. In the top of the pane, you will see your set and action.
now you are going to "play" the set and action you previously recorded.

choose your source folder (where you extracted your icons)
and your destination folder ( in this case i'm choosing the same folder, since i'm going to overwrite all of the icons)



Now click ok

Photoshop will now start "playing" the recording you made.

It will open every icon in your source folder, invert it, and change the hue/saturation for you.



The final step:

open the topmenu_plugin.rco you want to edit with Zinga's rco editor, select

"replace multiple"

browse to the folder where you just edited your icons in Photoshop



click ok, and you're done !!!!



In addition, this would also apply to any actions you create (desaturate, selective color, color balance, brightness/contrast, filtering, image resizing, etc.)

[Rich]

Wow, that seems easy enough. I'll give it a go later on.

[baseball_dude]

Flipping nice Tut!!!! Thank you sooooooooo much saved me like an hour on just re-coloring the topmenu now i can do the sumbmenu too in just 5 min!!

THANK YOU SOOOO SOOOO MUCH :D

[Oyabun]

no problem baseball_dude...glad it helped you.

i'm surprised there haven't been more comments on it.
originally i had it in the custom xmb icons section, and greg moved it to the tutorial section for me. i figured it would get more hits or comments here.

you seem to be the only one who took the time to read throught it and actually do it.

thanks for the reply !!! :mrgreenthumbsup:

[dj2b4life]

Great tut :mrgreenthumbsup:

[a'fiy]

sweet . thanks for the tutorial

[Vaughan14]

That could come in handy, but how did you edit the icons that where different dimensions?

[Oyabun]

Originally Posted by Vaughan14

That could come in handy, but how did you edit the icons that where different dimensions?

Vaughan14,

since i'm just inverting and changing the hue/saturation of the icons, it doesn't matter if the icons are of different dimensions when running the action script.

say you only had 2 icons, a 64x64 icon, and a 48x48 icon, and they are both the same color. i just want to invert and recolor both of them.

if i create an action, and record the 64x64 icon being inverted and recolored, and ran the script on the 48x48 icon, it would invert and recolor it.

the dimensions of the icons are irrelevant.

[Vaughan14]

True, I thought you cut out like the center part and re-colored it.

[Oyabun]

Originally Posted by Vaughan14

True, I thought you cut out like the center part and re-colored it.

Vaughan14,

read through the tutorial. you'll see nothing is being cut out to recolor the icons.