Hi Paul,
I think the batch processing options that were in photoshop are now within Adobe Bridge (under ‘Tools’) but I have not worked with this as yet so not sure on the quality or whether it will do what you need.
I had to do a similar thing last year with a pdf of lots of pages of slides that I had to link into an indesign file for digital print. I did this by
Exporting the pdf pages as seperate pages (in acrobat)
batch processing those pdf files to jpgs (graphicconverterX)
This worked really well for what I needed to do.
One other thing to mention is that most text in jpg files will be rasterised but I am guessing when you say ‘funky’ its more funky than it would normally be for jpg quality.
Hope this helps!