User manual

B
A
Figure 5.1: The Photoshop actions palette provides access to the scripting sys-
tem built into the program, allowing you to automate repetitive tasks
performed within Photoshop.
The first step to creating a droplet is to generate an action containing the
sequence of events that you would like to apply to images received by the
system. If you are familiar with making actions, you may proceed to generate
the desired action and skip the remainder of this paragraph - however if you
are new to the process continue reading on. To begin this process, open a
new image file and save it to disk (leave it open). Next, go to the Actions
palette (see fig. 5.1) and select the new button (marked A in figure 5.1).
In the resulting dialog box, enter a name for the new action and then click
the record button. At this stage, perform the tasks that you would like
the system to execute on images passing through the server - they will be
recorded and added to the action. Finally, click the stop button (marked B
in figure 5.1) and the action will be saved to the library.
As mentioned above, there are a few things that you need to be careful
of when creating an action. Firstly, you do not have to add any open or
save commands to the action as the droplet will handle these tasks for you.
You may add additional ’save as’ commands in the middle of the action,
however only use these to save intermediate steps. You may also open other
files to integrate into the image (eg a logo), however do not attempt to load
the main file as this will be done for you. Finally, it’s generally a good idea
to carefully select steps that avoid the requirement of user intervention as
the system won’t be able to proceed until someone responds. For an auto-
mated workflow, such interruptions are problematic and defeat the purpose
of having the computer automatically handle the processing.
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