Dr. Brown's scripts are absolute lifesavers. They take any menial file-saving task you can think of and they automate and expedite it. Every picture I've put on the web since 2008, I've done thanks to Dr. Brown.
I assumed that all the photographers in the world knew about these scripts, like everyone knows Photoshop or what a Shutter is. I learned during my weekend at Ragnar that many people don't have any idea who or what Dr. Brown is. Read on and prepare to have your mind blown and your workflow speed dramatically increased!
In a nutshell, the 1-2-3 process script for Photoshop and Bridge gives you the option to save any open or selected photos up to three times in three different formats without using any of your precious brainpower. Just a few clicks, run the script, and sit back while the computer works.
Let me show you what it looks like:
Dr. Russel Brown's website
Selecting photos to save directly from Bridge
The script UI
A lot of the functions that Dr. Brown does, you can create using Actions in Photoshop - but trust me, the good doctor does a much better job, and he does it faster, and he does it directly from Bridge!
When would you want to use this? Well, anytime you have more than say... one image that you'd like to save, in more than one format. For instance, I generally open my saved high resolution files from Aperture into Photoshop. I then use Dr. Brown's 1-2-3 script to save them as high res JPGs and again as lower resolution web-ready JPGs. You may notice that most of the photos that I post to the internet have a small (1px) gray border around them. That is courtesy of an action I built in photoshop. Dr. Brown gives me the option to apply any action I want while it is going through the images - so I tell it to apply the action *after* it resizes the photos. Lifesaver!
1-2-3 also makes it really easy to save an image to long-side pixel dimensions. For example, the photos I put on this blog are generally 1000 pixels on the long side and 72 PPI. You can see that setting illustrated here under the "Resize to Fit" section on the right.
Here's a link to a semi-quick video showing what the script can do.
Also - here's a link to Dr. Brown's site, where you can find scrips and tutorials for the several newest versions of Photoshop.
This post is about the scripts available for Photoshop CS4, but the CS5 scripts are just as great and readily available!
Questions? Comments? Let me know in the box below!
