Automation and scripting in Photoshop

Photoshop Actions are very useful – but you can do a-lot more with advanced scripting.

Photoshop actions are a very powerful feature of Photoshop that are used in production situations throughout the world. If you have never used them before – they are basically a list of comands that you can record (and change after) and play back again.

A simple example is resizing an image to certain dimensions and applying a filter then saving it in a certain folder – imagine if you had to do this on 500 images? Well, with Photohop actions you can record once – go to File>Automate>Batch and set-up as required. You click ok, go make a cup of coffee and get yourself a slice of cake, come back and continue working on that InDesign or Illustrator arrtwork whilst Photoshop happily churns through your images in the background as fast as it can!

However, you can if needs be go even further than that with AppleScript, JavaScript or VBScript. This really is the realms of advanced automation and is way beyond the scope of this post to explain! Photoshop Ninja is about pushing pixels, not lines of code, but if you really want to take automation to the next nevel you can get the documentation below:

Adobe Photoshop CS4 scripting documentation

Adobe Photoshop CS3 scripting documentation

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Written by Jonny Allbut - freelance graphic designer
Last modified: 2 May, 2009 (11:26) | First published: 1 May, 2009
Filed under Techniques - Other 7 Comments »

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7 Comments »

Comment by shureiman
May 3, 2009 @ 11:04 am

Thanks a lot, I didnt know how work with VBScript from Photoshop.
Comment by Ahmet Celik
May 11, 2009 @ 8:17 am

Nice docs Thank you!
Comment by semmy@ web 2.0 images
September 21, 2009 @ 11:39 am

Nice post! Really Love it! thank you very much!
Comment by Photoshop Ninja
October 5, 2009 @ 1:56 pm

My pleasure, glad it helped!
Comment by Joe Dirt
June 30, 2010 @ 4:52 pm

So i am trying to create a single action to resize a photo into 3 diffrent sizes(500×500, 200×175, 80×70) wich is not all that hard. problem i’m having is the resizing is conditional to the height and width of my photo and each photo is diffrent so i’m trying to figure out what script or action i can use to create either an action or droplet that will take a photo pick the largest number between the Height and Width and resize accordingly. If anyone can help me i would appreciate it. thanks!
Comment by Daniel Davis
August 11, 2010 @ 7:14 am

there is no other photo editing tool that is as good as Adobe Photoshop, It is simpy the best `
Comment by Photoshop Ninja
January 6, 2011 @ 2:14 pm

Hi Joe – sorry – this should be possible be scripting and automation.

Photoshop Ninja

Expert Photoshop tips and tricks for designers and photographers since 2005