Photoshop Ninja
Expert Photoshop tips and tricks for designers and photographers since 2005
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 CS4 Scripting Guide (PDF, 767k )
- Adobe Photoshop CS4 AppleScript Reference (PDF, 1.5M )
- Adobe Photoshop CS4 JavaScript Reference (PDF, 2.0M )
- Adobe Photoshop CS4 VBScript Reference (PDF, 1.3M )
Adobe Photoshop CS3 scripting documentation
- Adobe Photoshop CS3 Scripting Guide (PDF, 1.3M )
- Adobe Photoshop CS3 AppleScript Reference (PDF, 1.7M )
- Adobe Photoshop CS3 JavaScript Reference (PDF, 2.0M )
- Adobe Photoshop CS3 VBScript Reference (PDF, 1.6M )
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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 4 Comments »
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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!