’nuff said.

The following tutorial will show you how to do just that. After this walk through, you will have a folder full of all your original images turned into thumbnail sized images.

Step 1: Find the Actions Pallet

After opening Photoshop, what your going to need to find is your Actions pallet. If it isn’t immediately visible on your screen, you can make it pop up by going to these menus: Window > Actions.

Step 2: Add Some Resizing Actions

Adding your own custom actions is an extremely simple process. Basically all you need to do is tell Photoshop to watch what you do, and remember it. So what we need to do is, on that actions pallet, lets click the Folder Button at the bottom. This is going to create a new folder for us to play around in. You can call this folder anything you want, but for this tutorial (and possibly more later) lets go ahead and call it Tutorials. After you press enter, you should now have a new folder called Tutorials, but with nothing in it. So lets put some stuff in it! Lets now add the entire script that will handle our image resizing process. Go ahead and click the New Action button.

Lets name this new action something informative that you can use later, such as Make Thumbnail.

After naming it, click the Record button. This will add your new action to the Tutorials folder and also start the recording process. When an action is recording, it is watching every step in Photoshop you do and adding it to the action. So, say for example, you applied a filter right now. The filter application would get recorded, and at any time in the future, you could simply double click that action with any image open in Photoshop and it would apply that filter with the exact same settings you used.

Lets start recording exactly what we want to do now. First we need to Open an image. It really doesn’t matter what image, since we are just showing Photoshop what we want to do. The specific images will be put into the batch process in a later step. As soon as you open an image, you should notice that a new action appeared inside your Make Thumbnail action definition; Open. New actions will appear every time we complete a process until we click the stop button.

Lets continue by now resizing our image we just opened. Go to the image menu, then image size. (Image > Image Size…). In the menu that popped up, make sure that constrain proportions is checked. Go ahead and put in a common width that you want all your thumbnails to be. In this example, I’m going to use 150 pixels. Leave the height to whatever it changes to. As long as constrain proportions is checked, it should be fine.

Click OK. You should now have a very small thumbnail of your original image on your screen. Now we have to save this image somewhere. It really doesn’t even matter where you save the file, simply because once we start the batch process, the saving part will get overridden with a set destination. So just ahead and save the file ANYWHERE you want. (Just don’t overwrite the file you opened…. unless you want to)

Once you saved the file, Close the image.

Now you should have a blank Photoshop. Go ahead and look at your actions pallet. Your’s should resemble mine:

If you have Open, Image Size, Save, and Close all listed, then you’re good to go! Now, simply hit the Stop Button . Its immediately to the left of the red record button on the actions pallet. You just created your thumbnail creation script.

Step 3: Start the Batch Process

Go to the File menu, then Automate, then Batch… (File > Automate > Batch…)

Upon getting to the Batch dialog, we want to change a few settings, but first, make sure that you have the right stuff selected: the Set needs to be the folder you created earlier, Tutorials in this case. The Action should be set to the new action we made, Make Thumbnail for our project.

In the next section, our Source should be set to Folder. Right below, is a button that says Choose…. Click the button. This will open a file and folder dialog, asking you what folder to use. Select the folder that has all your images that you want to make thumbnails in it.

Make sure you select the next box, Override Action “Open” Commands. What this does, is whenever it sees that we opened a file, it doesn’t ask us what file to open, but instead, it keeps opening files in the specified folder.

On the Destination drop-down, make sure to select Folder. Now below that, click Choose and select a destination folder that you want all your thumbnails to be output to. (I made a new folder for this, but you can use the same folder as long as you make each thumbnail have a different name - defined below)

Make sure Override Action “Save As” Command is checked. This will save each file by a set of rules we are making right now, instead of asking us how to save it on each file.

In the following drop-downs, you can leave them as they are, or you can customize them any way you want. In the second box, i typed _thumbnail and changed the 3rd box to extension. This will result in the files being saved like: OriginalName_thumbnail.jpg

Now just click OK!

As soon as you click OK, Photoshop will start opening all your images, one at a time, and instantly resizing them down to 150 pixels (or whatever size you chose earlier), then saving them where you told it to. It sure is a lot faster than doing it manually, wouldn’t you agree?

But sometimes, the temptation is just too much for the reporter and they decide they have enough Photoshop experience and talent to get away with changing some elements in their shot.

This is becoming such a problem, that the Associated Press actually has a third party help them out with it. They contract the help of Hany Farid. Hany has made special software that analyzes photos to determine if it is genuine or not automatically. The software looks for certain red flags about the photo that the normal eye just wouldn’t catch without a magnifying glass. Things like repeating pixels patterns, or unnatural shadows, pixel patterns due to rescaling, and especially the pupil reflections of multiple people in the shot.

It make sense when ya think about it. What is reflected in one person’s pupil should also be reflected in another person’s, to an extent.

Forgery has been around ever since… well…. authenticity. Theres no way to eliminate it. But even so, things need to be done.

“This is an arms race,” Farid says. “I can already tell you how it’s going to end: We’re going to lose. It’s always going to be easier to create a forgery than detect a forgery. But we’re going to take the power to create forgeries out of the hands of amateurs. We will raise that bar up until you have to be very, very good to do it.”

Computing Photographic Forgeries [Via Boing Boing]