There might be situations where you need to apply individual retouching to every image but you might also have the need to apply the same adjustments to all of the shots. This is where the Bulk action panel in Hue will come in handy. This bulk action panel will reduce friction during your daily work, hence, reducing the overall cycle time and increasing the productivity of internal post-production.
In Photoshop head to Plugins -> Hue. There you will see two separate Hue panels, one is the Hue Bulk Actions and the other is Hue Tasks (The original panel).
You can open both panels and work on both at the same time, and even combine them into separate tabs of the same panel window.
This article will show you the functions of the Hue Bulk Actions panel.
If you want to learn more about the original Hue Tasks panel click here.
On the frontpage of the Bulk Actions panel, you will see actions regarding the following parts:
Tasks
Actions
Fan out
Export
Upload
1. Tasks
In this section, you can select one of the below actions on all of your current tasks:
Close all tasks: Saves and closes all open tasks in Photoshop
Re-start all tasks: Triggers restart all images on all the tasks you have currently open
Open all assigned tasks: Opens all Assigned tasks that are not currently open in Photoshop
2. Actions
Run Photoshop actions on all open files. The Hue Bulk Action panel takes all actions from your own Actions panel within Photoshop and lets you apply any action to as many files as you want.
Click Bulk Action to first select the action and then the files you wish to run that action on. Click the magnifying glass icon to search for the file names.
3. Fan out
Execute fan-out for all open files. Click Bulk Fan-out and select the desired fan-out approach. Here, you will see the files available for each product. The ‘M’ stands for the Main image, the numbers 1 and 2 and so on represent the variants. Depending on your setup, you can have more variants or fewer compared to the example below.
You can search for the product code or the image name in the search field here. In the Quick Select section, you can click ‘All’ to select all images, and click None to remove the selection, buttons 1 and 2 allow you to quickly select all variant-1 or variant-2 images respectively.
After selecting the images, you can click Duplicates if you want to copy the canvas and Blanks if you want to start from scratch.
If the image has been fanned out, on the right side of each variant row, the variant code will be displayed.
In the settings wheel at the bottom, you can select the following actions to control the additional functionality of the Duplicates action. By default, both of the boxes will be selected.
Scale to fit canvas
Center on canvas
When both boxes are checked, the following scenarios will happen after the file is created:
If the aspect ratio of the Variant is equal to the Main: Hue will resize the image to fit the dimensions of the workfile canvas as defined in preset.
If the aspect ratio of the Variant is proportionally taller than the Main, Hue will do the following:
Resize the variant image so that the height equals the height of the working file canvas/crop.
Then, center the image on canvas by aligning it to the horizontal middle of the canvas.
If the aspect ratio of the Variant is proportionally wider than the Main, Hue will do the following:
Resize the variant image so that the width equals the width of the working file canvas/crop.
Then, center the image on canvas by aligning it to the vertical middle of the canvas.
4. Export
Export all open files. Click ‘Export’ to get an overview of how the files will be exported and adjust if needed before exporting.
From Quick Select section, you can select ‘All’ to select all images, None to clear the selection, ‘Not exported’ to select the images that have not been exported and ‘QA warning’ to select those that have QA warnings.
Variants that have been fanned out will have the variant code displayed on the right side. Those that have not been fanned out will say ‘Not fanned out’.
After selecting the images, click ‘Next’ at the bottom of the panel. If your images meet the preset requirements you will see green color, otherwise, it will be orange. Here, you can see the details of the QA warnings by clicking on ‘Expand all’, click ‘Collapse all’ if you want to close it.
When clicking ‘Expand all’, next to the file format section, you can hover the triangle icon that shows you can apply the file format settings to the rest of the images with the same file format.
Click ‘Export’ if you want to export the images. After this process is finished, you will be brought back to the Bulk Export file selection page. Here, you can hover over the alert icon to see the QA warning message.
5. Upload
Upload all exported files and complete tasks. Here, you will see different colors: Orange to show that there are QA warnings and green to show that the variants have met the preset requirements.
If preset requirements are not met and the tasks do not allow Bypass QA warnings, you will not be able to select it to Upload.