Photoshop Scripts.
by Steve Donahue
(note from Kaosweaver - we know nothing about Photoshop, however, Steve has graciously provided these to help out everyone. I hope the note he attached below will detail the use of these scripts so you are able to easily adapt them to your work process - our thanks go to Steve for making this available. These scripts are found in the Resources directory)
I have cleaned up my Photoshop Action and Fireworks Scripts in attempt to make them generic enough for others to use. However, there are still several assumptions I had to make that will limit who can just use them straight "out of the box". Realistically, these scripts will more likely serve as an example for others to create their own actions.
I use both Photoshop and Fireworks because each has it's own scripting limitations. For instance, Fireworks can't handle 16 bit images (which I use). Furthermore, the things you can automate in a Fireworks script are somewhat limited (i.e. can't change canvas size, can't apply Unsharpen Mask, etc). On the other hand, Photoshop doesn't allow me to rename images and still maintain JPG optimization settings.
By using both programs, I can do everything I need to do. It's still a pretty automated process, it just requires playing scripts in two different programs. Not too big of a deal.
First, here are the assumptions for using these scripts.
Starting full-sized images are either 720 pixels wide or tall (or both).
I am using both image aspects, so the _main, _thumb, and _over images will be forced into square images (with white canvas in the unused image area).
The resulting _main images will be 350x350 pixels. The _thumb and _over images will be 120x120 pixels.
The files will be saved in the following directories: C:\ArtistGallery\Large\, C:\ArtistGallery\Main\, C:\ArtistGallery\Over\, and C:\ArtistGallery\Thumb\. Unfortunately, Photoshop doesn't save relative paths when using the "Save for Web" feature, so I had to use C:\ArtistGallery\* to make the action where it would work for (almost) everyone. NOTE: You must create these directories manually prior to running these actions. (Kaosweaver note: these were made prior to the name change to inTensa Design Gallery - use the names specified here or the scripts will fail)
Fireworks scripts will be used to process (simply rename) the files in these directories.
I have made two different Photoshop actions. The first is called "Create Images", and the other "Create Images with Drop Shadows". The one that adds drop shadows only does so for the full-sized (pop-up) image and the _main image. The thumbnails do not have drop shadows.This action is loaded into Photoshop as follows. Open Photoshop, go to the actions palette, on the top right of the palette, click on the little triangle (delta) and from the menu choose load action. Find where you downloaded the ArtistGallery.atn" file and click on load.
The Fireworks scripts are simply used to rename the files in the respective directories. These scripts should be unzipped and installed into the Fireworks Commands directory (on my system that would be C:\Program Files\Macromedia\Fireworks 4\Configuration\Commands). Once installed, three commands that will appear under the Commands>AGPro menu: "Main", "Over", and "Thumb". When you run these, just select all files in the appropriate directory (i.e. for "Main", select files in the C:\ArtistGallery\Main\ directory. All files will be output into the parent directory (C:\ArtistGallery\).
The only thing left to do is move all of the files in C:\ArtistGallery and C:\ArtistGallery\Large into the directory you are going to run the AGPro extension on.
We hope these are useful and if you have another solution that would work better, please post the URL to the forum and alert us, We'll make them available on the kaosweaver website or provide a link to your site, if desired)