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A
ALPHA3
Inspiring
August 23, 2017
Question

How to record an action for healing brush/clone tool ?

  • August 23, 2017
  • 3 replies
  • 12082 views

Hi,

most of you who know photoshop so well, know it's a fact it's impossible to record an healing brush or a stamp tool to apply. Also is knowns the patch tool is the only way to make theses kinds of corrections and record them but the patch tool is not doing a great job as the healing brush, if you know your stuff.

This situation is never the less something many can experience, shooting products and having the same spots, dust and scratch to remove over 600 images is a major challenge.

I know when photoshop cannot record tools or specific task then scripting is the way to go.

Will scripting can open new possibilities to use healing brush corrections over an image to apply over many others doing the same corrections ?

Also I'll post this in the request for new versions or updates coming up in photoshop family page.

Mark

This topic has been closed for replies.

3 replies

L
Lengo67
Inspiring
March 13, 2018

I have found the answer.

Navigate to this page:

Record tools in actions in Photoshop

Though this is meant for CS6, it works in CC.

RedGreenBlue1024

    Kukurykus
    Kukurykus
    Legend
    March 14, 2018

    I did not know about possibility to record your drawings. Because I had grayed 'Allow Tool Recording' I had to find this:

    CS6 How to set option Allow Tool Recording ? / in 19.1.2 you still have to disable ScriptListener to use it this option

    JJMack
    Community Expert
    JJMackCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    March 14, 2018

    The scriptlisener in an optional download a plug-in most user do not even know it exists.  Installing Scriptlistener diasble tool recording.

    IMO Tool recording is not useful generally it may have limited special case use. Tool recording is also not well implemented you need to record steps into these action to compensate for the poor implementation things that should have been recorded like brush tip size change etc are not recorded. So recording actions that use tool recording have many pitfalls.  And Document you play the actions on must be the same size and resolution as the document the action was recorded on. You will not be able to turn Photoshop into a vector pating applicatiom. I do not have a single action that used tool recoring.

    Scriptlisener may simply disable it because of its poor implmentation or because Tool Recording does not record action steps and the amount of tool recording data can be huge.

    JJMack
    c.pfaffenbichler
    Community Expert
    c.pfaffenbichlerCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    August 24, 2017
    most of you who know photoshop so well, know it's a fact it's impossible to record an healing brush or a stamp tool to apply.

    That is untrue as JJMack already pointed out.

    But recording such Tools in an Action can be problematic … if I remember correctly changing the diameter of the tool tip for example does not get recorded.

    As for the sensor dust I would recommend considering using Camera Raw for this – »Sync Settings« allows to transfer Spot Removal to multiple files for example.

      JJMack
      Community Expert
      JJMackCommunity Expert
      Community Expert
      August 24, 2017

      I seem to remember your right about the brush settings.  I also had problems with the amount of data recorded between slow machines an fast machine.  Action recorded on fast machine there was a great amount of data recorded amount for tool used the actions would overtax slow machines. Some Brush type require sampling a sourse spot first like the healing brush. So the depend on the image content which can also be a Problem recording tools.  I do not use tool recoding....

      There are application for sensor dust problems beside ACR for cleaning up RAW files.  If your camera is expensive have your sensor cleaned professionally. I'm a coward  to use more then a bower on my old Canon my newer cannon has a sensor cleaner function.  I still manage to get dust spots at time and only use  ACR and the spot healing brush when needed.

      JJMack
      A
      ALPHA3Author
      Inspiring
      October 2, 2017

      thanks guys for your input

      Davide_Barranca12040269
      Davide_Barranca12040269
      Legend
      August 23, 2017

      Hi Mark,

      if you have the very same spots to retouch over and over again (aka a dusty sensor), is it conceivable to create Path points and then Stroke them using the Spot Healing Brush Tool?

      I know you can stroke entire paths, I've just tested single points and it works the same.

      Hope this helps,

      Davide

      Davide Barranca - PS developer and authorwww.ps-scripting.com
        JJMack
        Community Expert
        JJMackCommunity Expert
        Community Expert
        August 24, 2017

        If you do not install Adobe Scriptlistener plug-in you should be able to record an action to do that.  You can enable tool recording to record your spot healing brush strokes.   When one install the Scriptlistener plug-in Adobe disables the tool recording feature in the Action palettes option.  You should include a  little script in the action like my  orient.jsx which will  rotate portrait images 90 to landscape so the spots will be in the same location,  Then apply the brush stroke and use orient.jsx a second time to rotate documents the were rotated back to portrait. However Adobe design in a bug in CC 2015.5 and CC 2017 you need to add garbage to the info metadata field first if you using the latest Photoshop versions to get around the bug. That can be done with a open document event handler, Use this script.

        if (app.activeDocument.info.instructions.indexOf("Garbage") == -1 ) app.activeDocument.info.instructions = app.activeDocument.info.instructions + "Garbage";

        JJMack
        Davide_Barranca12040269
        Davide_Barranca12040269
        Legend
        August 24, 2017

        JJMack, do you think, in line of principle, that processing an Action that has recorded brush strokes in it through XBytor's Action2JSX could effectively produce the code of scripted brush strokes (among the rest)? I have to test it, but I've vague recollections of having done such experiment in the past resulting in a frozen Photoshop.

        Besides, while there's code to programmatically enable/disable ScriptListener logging, I'm not aware of similar code to enable/disable brush strokes logging. Since an Action, as you pointed out, can record them – and SL works based on the same internal events system, there should be a way to do so... maybe. Or maybe not.

        Davide Barranca - PS developer and authorwww.ps-scripting.com
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