tricks about actions
Hi,
In this thread I'll record my thoughts about writing actions. And more often, when we download some action and try to use it in our own way or adjust it a little bit, weird things happen! I'll try to fix this kind of problem, too.
I know nearly nothing about scripts, so maybe my "trick" is too complicated.
Please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
1, about stamp layer, especially action begins with it.
Using ctrl+J command or ctrl+shift+alt+E is natural but often wrong --- if your current layer is an adjusting layer, ctrl+J will not get a stamp layer, of course. But ctrl+shift+alt+E also is not perfect - if you only get one layer "background", you'll get nothing. Obviously an action can not easily tell if it's adjusting layer or background layer. Or, with so many actions in hand, you just can not remember which action need you to prepare a stamp layer for it, which will make stamp layer for you.
My trick: new layer; apply image.
2, run action multiple times, causing duplicated layer names
Let me take an example here. Frequency Separation(FS) is a wide spread tech, with so many possible personal variations. We could download so many actions about FS. But if you try to run it more than once, something could happen - in mose cases, gaussian blur or Apply Image will need to use target layer by name, so if you ran action again, the calculation will be based on old layer or alert error.
My trick: at the end of the action, record/add some more steps, changing every possibly related layer's name. Thus, every new running of this action will still have unique layer names.
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