Bridge scripting learning curve

[hillrg]

I must admit I was a little confused when I first looked at Bridge scripting. I had some background writing photoshop scripts. This forum is an excellent resource to supplement the documentation.

Anyway, I have figured out everything I needed to port a script from photoshop that creates subfolders in the current active bridge folder, opens a dialog to get resizing and beveling parameters, applies those parameters to resize and bevel the selected bridge thumbnails and saves the jpgs in the subfolders.

Bob - thanks very much for your help getting me pointed in the right direction. I even have the ESTK working. You are the man!

Rory

[_Robert_Stucky_]

That's great!

I'm glad I was able to help.

Did you use BridgeTalkIterator for a progress bar??

Heck, post it on Exchange!

Bob
Adobe Workflow Scripting

[_mason_dean_]

Bob-

Sorry to write with a basic question, but I'm trying to figure out how to use Adobe Bridge to automate some basic image processing tasks (open tiff, place on bottom layer, add 2 new layers one with a cropped bit from the main image, save whole bit as a PSD), but I can't even really figure out how to get started on scripting in Bridge! I've looked in the Bridge help files and on the Adobe website and have messed around with the Bridge Javascript Reference, but don't have a background in Java - is there a beginner's guide?

Thanks!
Mason
mdean@uci.edu

[Bob__Adobe_Engineer]

First off, JavaScript and Java are vastly different. There are a number of JavaScript books out there. I don't have a recommendation for one, but I am sure someone else on this forum does.

Probably the best way to get started for you is to write a script for Photoshop that does what you want to one image. Bridge doesn't do any of the image manipulations itself. Bridge allows you to select sets of images, and then start a script that will execute in Photoshop. So the first step is a working Photoshop script. Once you have that, you can create a menu item in bridge to run the script, you can use the BridgeTalkIterator object I wrote to easily execute your photoshop script from bridge on all the selected files.

I hope this helps.

Bob

[_mason_dean_]

Bob-

Thanks so much - and again sorry for the novice questions!

I'm cobbling these concepts together piecemeal, so bear with me...I found the automator in PS and built a simple automation to manipulate a single image. (I assume this GUI-based method is generating a script somewhere?) A few more questions, if you have a minute:

- How can I make it more generalized so that it (1) doesn't select the same image file every time (once I apply it to an image batch), (2) can save the PSD according to the image file name?
- Can you point me in the right direction to find out more about the BridgeTalkIterator and how to set it up?

Again, I appreciate your time!
Mason
mdean@uci.edu

[Bob__Adobe_Engineer]

The best example of BridgeTalkIterator is the open/close example script posted on Exchange. All it does is take the selected files in bridge, and then open and close them. If you supply your script (in the place of the one that opens and closes the file in PS), you'll be done.

What it does is execute a script for each file selected in bridge. So you're question 1 is handled. Your question 2 is more involved, it depends on the filename you want to save. file.name gives you the file name, so you can take that and modify it, create a new file object (with the new name) and then save it using PS's save method.

Bob