Photoshop Scripting - General Question

Hi all:

I posted this query in one other forum, but I figured it'd be for a pretty narrow audience, so:


We've come to the point where actions aren't doing everything we want to streamline workflow, and I've elected myself to figure out scripting. The main things we're trying to do are things like being able to easily do multiple directory switches in a "save" action, and being able to use a conditional to avoid having to do certain adjustments separately for horizontal and vertical aspect ratios.

My first two big, semi-general, questions are, first, if someone can clear up the simplest work method to do basic scripting. After eating up a day reading it appears that doing it in JavaScript, with the ExtendScript toolkit, is the way to go. But, that begs the question of how that relates to the Action Manager, and the ScriptListener plug-in. It seems like the idea is to use ScriptListener as a sort of "super action recorder" to get a script to start with, then edit it with either the Action Manager or ExtendScript Toolkit. So, what's the workflow on actually doing the script?

Second, does anyone know of educational resources for learning more about this? The Adobe documentation is extensive, but reads like it was written by Bill Gates' geekier brother. The stuff I've found on the web is aimed at guys smarter and more software oriented than me (and I have an engineering degree!).

Thanks in advance. So far, this timesaver...well....ain't.

Welcome Mike,
The most accessible and comprehensive guide to automating Photoshop is "The Photoshop CS2 Speed Clinic" by Matt Koskowski. Yes, it's not been updates to CS3 but I suspect 99% of the content remains accurate for CS3.

Personally, I think that the best automation technique is to skip the geeky route and just hire some kid for a few bucks to use it for you. (Oops, my apologies if you're a "some kid". <g>)

Just use the landscape versus portrait checks in Bridge to separate the two sets of images. Then create a meta Action that rotates the image 90 degrees, calls the base action, and then rotates the image -90 degrees. You then run two separate batches. Albeit, you may need a step for rotating watermarks/signatures too.

For resizing, simply using the File->Automate->Fit Image... to handle both. I believe Fit Image... uses your default interpolation settings.

Beyond that, the Adobe scripting documentation is very user friendly in comparison to any Microsoft documentation (Microsoft tends to use new words for 30 year old concepts which means their documentation is virtually unsearchable as the concept you want typically has a moronic new name that is barely related to the topic at hand).

I would suggest simply reading the Scripting Guide (a mere 85 pages for CS3) and going from there. The other scripting documents are references for specific languages and they are not for getting the gist of things.

I agree JavaScript is the way to go as AppleScript and VBScript are not portable across platforms.

some thoughts,

Sean