CGTalk - Repeating Actions

zzacmann

04-18-2005, 06:03 PM

Im making an animated gif of smoke in Photoshop. I created a nice smoke movie in Particle Illusion first, then rerendered that movie out into a 100 x 100 JPG sequence. I now want to take all of those JPGS and put them into one PSD file with each sequential frame being a new layer.

What I've been doing is taking opening all of the frames up at one time, which creates about 50 windows, and then I've created an action that selects the previous frame, converts it to a layer, and copy/pastes it into the final PSD image as a new layer. This works great, but after it does this action on one frame and closes that window, I have to press the play action button again for the next frame. Is there a way that I can make the action repeat over and over until all the frames are done instead of having to press play 50 times?

theGuest

04-19-2005, 06:48 AM

Yes, you should be able to do that very simply.

What you need to do is run the action within the Batch command instead.
Create the action to run through all of the steps you need.
Apply that action through the Batch command, pointing your 'source' folder to a folder containing all of the Jpg images.

So basically you'll need to do thsi:

Open your target document.
Open one of the frame images.

Start recording your action.

Go through the step of changing the Background layer to an alpha layer.
Then select All.
Then do Copy.
Then activate the target document, and Paste.
Then close the frame image document.
( Select NO when asked whether to save changes to it. )

Stop recording.

Now just run that Action through the Batch command, and point the 'Source' folder to the folder containing all of your sequence Jpg images. For the Destination option set it to 'None'. Leave all other defaults as-is.

Any questions just ask.
Hope that helps. :bounce:

jbw

04-19-2005, 01:11 PM

Alternatively you could import the folder into imageready.
It's the only thing I use imageready for. Go file>import folder as frames.

Now move the file to photoshop and you're done. :)

ta,
jbw

theGuest

04-20-2005, 09:13 AM

Yup, that's a good alternative to an Action.

Although there would still be another step involved, because he'd need to import his base layer from his original target document. But that takes all of a few seconds.

Good thinking jbw. :thumbsup:

:bounce:

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04-20-2005, 09:13 AM

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