[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.)

[Aaron*1]

I'd just like to say that this is a very good tutorial and it's very easy.

As some of you might have seen, I've been asking questions about making themes about the place as I intend to make one. I tried this on the official icons and I recoloured them to make them Yellow to test it and it worked spectacularly.

[Oyabun]

It's really helpful for recoloring the new 5.00 OSKs.


There are over 330 image files () in osk_plugin_500.rco


I couldn't imagine the tedious task of having to recolor those one by one.

[Aaron*1]

WHOAH THAT'S A LOT!!
I'm glad this tutorial's here then... I'd have to spend hours making it because I'd never heard of batch processing in PS.

It's a bit like macros, but for PhotoShop and you can make it use it on all the pictures in a folder.

[osnap1584]

been trying to link this tutorial to some lazy bastards that wants to recolor their icons but they never bother to read it. Gonna have to use this when I recolor schmilk's osk.