High Motion Software has shipped ImBatch 4.4.0, a major update to its free-for-personal-use image batch processing tool.

New PDF input support means the program can now process multi-page PDFs just as easily as image files.

You could resize or rotate PDF pages, for example. Add watermarks. Play with colours. Optimise pages for size or quality, tweak brightness or contrast, adjust sharpness, deskew text, or apply a host of special effects.

All this can be fully automated, with the results saved as images or recombined into a new PDF.

Extract PDF pages as images, add watermarks, resize, rotate and more

This isn’t quite as good as it sounds, because unlike the specialist competition, ImBatch can’t process PDFs directly – it only works with extracted pages. As a result, any special properties or settings you’d given the original PDF will be lost.

There doesn’t seem to be any support for password-protected PDFs, either, although that’s probably no surprise for this initial release.

Still, ImBatch’s lengthy list of processing tasks means it’ll still be useful in lots of situations, and there’s no doubt the new PDF support is a great addition to the package.

This release also sees support for multipage image files, welcome news for TIFF users.

Other tweaks include smarter contact sheet creation, and improvements in the “Save to PDF” and Options dialogs.

ImBatch 4.4.0 is a free-for-personal-use application for Windows XP and later.