I have looked and looked for this answer and hope I am not repeating a question or asking something dumb. I have just purchased the Hidden Powers book for Elements 2 and was hoping it would help me do what I am needing. I LOVE the book and the CD. I have downloaded both sets of free actions and have them installed. I have tried Chucks auto level corrections and though they help, they don't seem to do what I need done. I will try to explain below.

I have a digital Rebel and often take pictures of my kids high school plays and concerts. Because of lighting situations, I often have to "correct" these pictures. I usually alter the histogram to fix the problem. I then like to resize the picture to 4x6, 300dpi, and compress at 10. This way I can send these pictures to Walmart.com for all the kids to be able to order their own pictures, without me being involved in the process. When I tried batch processing to resize the image, it never seems to change the file size by much. SIne I don't see a place for inches, I use pixels 1200 x 1800 and have tried doing jpegH and jpegM. This seems to change the size of the picture to 4x6, but doesn't change the file size by much. It takes way too long to download the big files to Walmart as they do not have an ftp way of doing it. (If I resize it my way I can get it down to about 350 K, instead of 2M).

I have kind of figured out that I may not be able to get a batch processing to alter my pictures as a set. Auto level doesn't seem to fix them enough, I usually have to alter the center of the histogram in addition to the sides and I can't find a way to do this in batch processing. I think that since this would be different with each set of pictures, it might not be able to be brought to Elements as a set action.

But I was hoping their was a way of getting my pictures at least sized correctly for me to be able to do this easier. It takes up a lot of my time to downsize these pictures and I may not be ble to continue doing this for the kids.

If anbody has any ideas I would love to hear from them. I am trying to keep from buying the big Photoshop,as Elements seems to be able to do anything else I want. I plan on buying Richards healing tool for fun, though I have kind of been doing it my own way by altering the opacity of the cloan tool. But I would like to see what all the fuss is about the healing tool. It sounds like it may be awesome!!

Thanks again for any help.

Lorie

I am on vacation and don't have a computer to check...and I might have this confused with Photoshop CS, so forgive me...

But, first resize your images with bulk process and then print them with Picture packages.

Does that help?

Richard ... thank you so much for responding, you are so awesome to be so devoted to your readers.

I don't think I have a bulk process.... I do have batch process which is what I have been trying to do to them, but for some reason when I save them at the 4x6 size and at 300 dpi, it doesn't make the file size as small as when I do it all manually, I think it may be that the compression in the actions is not set to 10. But when I try to do it at jpegM or jpegH, I still don't get it to make files as small as when I do it individually. I thought it would be okay, but when I tried to send all those bigger files to walmart.com.... it took FOREVER and then messed up at the end and didn't even accept them.

I also can't do the picture package thing as I upload them all to an album and the kids get online and pick out the individual pictures they want to order as 4x6's. They don't have to get every picture. This way they order themselves and pick up at walmart and I don't have to do anything else with them. I just do this for fun for the kids, but I also like to do this on pictures to send the Grandparents and they pick out what they like. I just thought there had to be an easier way. I know after reading around that with Photoshop CS I would just make it as an action after I do it to one picture. But I can't for the life of me figure out why I can't get it to resize using the batch processing file. I didn't want to spend the money on the big deal and I wanted to make it easier. I know I am probably going to find some crazy thing I am not doing. I just can't figure it out.

Thanks so much for looking at this and trying to help. If you come up with something, please let me know. Have a great time on vacation!!!