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Automating Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Photoshop is by far the standard among graphics professionals. It allows artists to work more efficiently, explore new creative options, and produce the highest quality images for print, the Web, and anywhere else. In addition, beginning with version 7.0, Adobe Photoshop can be automated with the FREE plug–in provided by Adobe.
Any size company or project, our solutions can help save you time. While the automation possibilities are endless, this page contains a few general ideas to get you started.
Project Ideas
Create It – Generate images more efficiently
When combining data content into your images, avoid carpal tunnel syndrome by reducing the effort to a single click! Our solutions can extract data from a data source, manipulate it as needed and flow it into a image. Update the prices of all your product catalog images by double–clicking your custom Write Track Media script. Drop a bunch of PDFs onto another script and watch a preview or thumbnail of the cover page appear neatly inside of an organized folder structure. All of your repetitive image creation can be automated.
Modify It – Manipulate batches like magic
Ever change the image size, resolution, rotation, and color mode of an image? Have you recently saved an image file as high res and low res? Photoshop makes these tasks easy. Ever have to do all of the above to a hundred files at once? A custom solution from Write Track Media makes THAT easy! Drop a bunch of files onto a script and sit back and watch them each get your logo stamped in the corner. Quickly create a gif file from a high res file of every product your company makes. Resizing and printing batches of digital images is a snap. Build an index print, apply filters, add borders, crop, rotate – ten images or a thousand – it can all be automated.
Output It – Convert your files for every use
Perhaps one of the most repetitive tasks one encounters when dealing with digital images is the output process. Preparing folders stuffed with files for emailing to a client, uploading to the web or archiving in various file types is a very routine process. We can create the tools you need to save time.
Better than Actions – It's the next step
Photoshop actions are like older "macro–technology" – powerful and useful, but limited in scope. Custom AppleScript solutions from Write Track Media can be made as "smart" as you need them to be. Considering the context of your files or some options you select in a dialog, the events triggered by a script can have minor variations on a theme or branch into an endless array of totally different automated processes. Actions are good for repetitive activity that is exactly the same every time. AppleScripts can be built to branch and flex as your workflow demands. They can even manage the use of actions.
Think Bigger – Integrate with others
Don't limit your thinking to Photoshop alone. Instead, when planning automation projects, think of it in the context of your entire workflow. AppleScripts allow you to integrate functions of many different applications. Data from a database can be combined with stock images in a folder to form an image that can be put into a PDF, uploaded to a web site, and placed into a desktop publishing document – all automatically.
Don't just stare at it – Push the chores to a server
Every script we build can be easily converted to run on a myFactory automation server. Your staff can feed their images to the server for processing freeing their computer to prepare the next batch of images or perform any other important task. Send a large batch of files before lunch or as you leave at night and myFactory will keep working in your absence.
Dream Higher – The Sky is not the Limit
Remember that virtually any series of steps you can perform with your computer manually can be automated. It's not a question of "if" it can be done but only if it's worth the effort to automate it. To determine that, consider how often you are simply repeating the same actions to large volumes of files or manually moving data around that follows very rigid rules. No one can replace people when it comes to creative decision–making. But you can eliminate the repetitive procedure driven chores that replace your happy and productive state of mind.
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