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H
harrysherwood68
Participant
July 5, 2011
Question

Hand painted layer masks dysfunctional in actions?- scripting

  • July 5, 2011
  • 2 replies
  • 556 views

Hi Guys,

I asked this question in the normal photoshop section but some people said that i would have more luck/detail here...

I've just attempted to make an action in CS5 with under 20 steps in it, the action goes along these lines (this is what i see in the actions pallet):

crop, duplicate layer, Gausssian Blur layer, new layer mask, select brush, save, close

Even though I am doing plently of painting with a black paintbrush within the layer mask, no further steps seem to be recorded each time I click with the brush. Furthermore when I test the action on an image no mask has been painted and the whole image is blurred, which is not my intention. Is there something I am doing wrong or have I tapped into some missing functionality in Photoshop...? (Oh No!)

Apparently i can solve this and paint a mask using scripting, is this true? i'm completely new to scripts by the way.

Thanks,

Harry

This topic has been closed for replies.

2 replies

M
Michael_L_Hale
Inspiring
July 5, 2011

Even if you could record/script brush strokes that would give you the same mask for every image. I wouldn't think that would be very useful. You could insert a stop after the 'select brush' step. That way you could paint the desired mask then click on the play button to finish the action.

If you did want the same mask for every image you could save that mask as a grayscale image once. Then you could include opening that image and creating the mask from that image in your action. Or depending on the mask and your version of Photoshop you might be able to use a path to create a vector mask and use mask panel to feather the path.

H
harrysherwood68Author
Participant
July 5, 2011

Thanks, Michael.

Do you think you might be able to give me some further details about how to use a bitmap image as a mask? not something i've done before.

Thanks for all the help.

Harry

M
Michael_L_Hale
Inspiring
July 5, 2011

With the layer that has the mask you want to use selected go to the channels panel and select the layer mask channel. Right click on the channel and duplicate it to an new document. Switch to the new document and convert to grayscale then save.

Later you want to apply the saved mask to a layer in a new document you first create a blank mask for the layer. Choose the mask in the channel panel. Open the saved grayscale and select the channel. Select all and copy, switch to the other documents with the blank mask channel selected and paste.

You can also do much the same with the Apply Image command to transfer the channel instead of copy/paste.

As long as you keep the grayscale image in the same place on the HD you can record all thses steps in an action.

Paul Riggott
Paul Riggott
Inspiring
July 5, 2011

Sorry but brush strokes can not be recorded or scripted.

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