PS BATCH ICON TUTORIAL
This tutorial will show you how to make any amount of icons you so desire - IN ONE SITTING! (up too 500 at most to respond properly without lag). This is largely an image based tutorial, but if anything is unclear, please send me your questions!
you will need:
-photoshop
-some screencaps or images you wish to edit
tutorial below the cut:
STEPS:
1. open photoshop. then go to file --> Scripts --> Load files from stack.
2. when the box pops up, select ‘Browse’. This will open up your documents, in which you can then select all of the screencaps (or other images) you will be using to make icons out of. After you have all of your files selected, hit ‘open’, in your documents.
3. All of the files you selected should now be listed in the space besides the ‘browse’ menu button. If you want to add more, just hit browse again, and select what you’d like! When you are satisfied with the images in this area, you can then hit ‘OK’, and photoshop will begin to load all of your images into layers. Depending on your amount, this may take a while. ( several hundreds of screencaps tend to take about 5 minutes to completely load for me - they’re big images lol. )
4. Photoshop will look like this when your images load completely. I have only decided to use 14 images for the sake of saving time.
5. To eventually export all of these images as separate icons, you need to have them each in frames. To do this you need to convert them. There is a little dropdown menu in the timeline ( AS SHOWN BELOW ) that you need to click.
6. Search for the option that says ‘Make Frames from Layers’. Once you find that, click it.
7. If you’ve done this successfully, all of your layers should now also have corresponding frames in the timeline!
8. Time to crop! Most of the time, icons are in a square shape, so we want to crop them! If you go to the crop tool, and select the drop down menu (AS SHOWN BELOW) you can select the 1x1 Square option.
9. your cropping selection should now look like this. feel free to move the square if your subject/muse isn’t in the center, like mine is.
10. When happy with the placement, select any other tool on the photoshop panel, and it will pop up with a box asking you to confirm that you want to crop the images. Hit ‘Crop’. Now your images should look like this:
11. Time to resize the images, because they are still really big! If you go up to the tabs next to ‘file’, select ‘image’ and then hit ‘image size’.
12. When the box pops up, it will show you the current size of your images. change it to the size you would like your icons to be. Im going to change mine to 100 x 100 pixels. Then hit ‘OK’.
13. After resizing, your image may be zoomed out a bit in photoshop, making it appear smaller than 100 x 100 (or whichever size you chose). If you go to the lower lefthand corner, right above your image frames, there is a percentage. That is how zoomed in your image is.
14. Double click, change that number to 100 and hit enter, and it will zoom in to the accurate size of your image.
15. Now its time for a psd (the edits you will apply to your icons) ! This is where you can either leave your icons raw, make your own psd, or use a psd that someone has made that you can use! There are tons of really great ones on here, made by other users! I will be using one of my own.
IF YOU INTEND TO LEAVE YOUR ICONS LIKE THEY ARE NOW, SKIP TO STEP 21.
To import your psd, open it as you would a normal image. (note that your separate projects have separate tabs in photoshop)
16. place your cursor over your psd’s tab and drag it down into the editing space (AS SHOWN BELOW)
17. Its okay to let go of the cursor, nothing bad will happen. Your document should now look like this. It should appear to be hovering above our batch icon project.
18. Place your cursor on the psd image (make sure it is on the image itself and not on the edge of the document) and drag it under itself and onto your batch icon project. While dragging it, you should see a sort of gray outline of the psd, as shown below.
19. If you dragged it correctly, the psd should now be applied to your icons! MAKE SURE YOUR PSD FOLDER IS AT THE TOP, ABOVE ALL OF YOUR ICONS!!! if it is under any of the icons, those icons above it won’t have the psd applied to them.
20. Feel free to add anything else extra you’d like, if they aren’t in the psd; such as a border, or a watermark!
21. Now all thats left to do is save the icons! To do so, go to file --> export and click ‘render video’. You click render video because your images are in frames, and you are going to be saving each frame.
22. After selecting ‘render video’, the box below will pop up. Feel free to name the icons whatever you’d like, or leave them as untitled. The ‘select folder’ location is important. this is where your icons will be saved to. Click the ‘select folder’ button and choose where you want your icons to go! ALSO make sure that you have ‘Photoshop Image Sequence’ selected, (PNG) and not a video format. IF YOU HAVE CIRCULAR ICONS OR ICONS WITH A TRANSPARENT BACKGROUND it is highly important that at the bottom of this box, you change the ‘Alpha Channel’ box from none to ‘straight - unmatted’ or ‘premultiplied with black’. Either selection will work, but if you leave it as its default of ‘none’, then your icons WILL NOT save with a transparent background.
23. Hit Render! If you don’t have very many icons, this should be done without any loading bar popping up. If you have several hundreds of icons, a progress bar will show up, and you can watch this whole process load! Your icons should then all be in a folder somewhere where you chose for them to go!
if you have any questions or run into any problems, PLEASE ASK! I am here to help you in any way I can!