Action for saving individual layers

[Tim Nelson]

So I'm curious what the best way to do this would be. What if I had a bunch of layers in photoshop that I wanted to export as individual frames to then be strung together in an editing program to create a movie? Is there any way to automate that so it assigns a numbered jpeg sequence the the layers in order?

[Bwana Kahawa]

I ended up doing it manually for my AVC entry, as I don't know my way around actions.

 

I hear it's possible to record actions so that whenever numeric input is needed, you can get it to prompt each time and then type in the numbers. Takes out half the work, but you'd still need to do the numbering yourself.

 

Don't ask me how to do it though - never got on with actions much myself...

[Gus_Rayvus]

you can create the movie in photoshop. Just open up the animation window. You can key the layers from there and just export it as avi or an animated gif.

 

send me mail sometime, we should catch up

[Dave Buchhofer]

only way to run an action on each layer is via photoshops built in javascript (Or another programming language if you want to be technical) as far as I know.

 

here's my weak little .js that runs an action on every layer of a psd file grabbed it from their script listener though so its neigh unto unreadable. Run Action on Every ArtLayer

 

Adam talks about doing something similar via Python here, i haven't gotten too far into it yet though as the need hasn't re-appeared in a while, but it looks pretty damn powerful! http://techarttiki.blogspot.com/2008/08/photoshop-scripting-with-python.html

[Tim Nelson]

you can create the movie in photoshop. Just open up the animation window. You can key the layers from there and just export it as avi or an animated gif.

After I posted this question I started looking into the animation tools a little bit in photoshop. So far I haven't been able to figure out how to draw different things on different frames. It seems like if you draw on a layer it applies anything you do to all the animation frames too.

[Gus_Rayvus]

Get all your layers you want in. Switch to this animation window. Turn all layers off. Add how many frames you want. Turn on what you want for each frame.

 

Or go to the corner pull down and select make frames from layer. Then you are all set.

[Tim Nelson]

Get all your layers you want in. Switch to this animation window. Turn all layers off. Add how many frames you want. Turn on what you want for each frame.

 

Or go to the corner pull down and select make frames from layer. Then you are all set.

Sweet! Thanks Pete, that's perfect. That is why I hate reading help files - for all the pages there are about animation frames, it couldn't help me figure out what you did in a couple sentences.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

Since you were able to accomplish want you wanted, it is a mute point, but I think there is a default script to save layers out as files.

 

 

[Tim Nelson]

Since you were able to accomplish want you wanted, it is a mute point, but I think there is a default script to save layers out as files.

I tried it, but it does not number them correctly or something, because if I try to bring them into Premiere it does not recognize the numbering system and will only bring in one file instead of the whole sequence. I suppose there is a renaming program out there that could put them into a workable order, but I'd rather not have to do that.

 

I'm interested to see what kinds of things people have been able to accomplish with photoshop and the animation tools. I bet there are lots of possibilities.

[Scott Erstad]

You could export to ImageReady, setup your timing for all your tweens, then save out in a variety of anime formats. Just a thought, it looks like you have it figured out.

 

Scott

[BrianKitts]

I tried it, but it does not number them correctly or something, because if I try to bring them into Premiere it does not recognize the numbering system and will only bring in one file instead of the whole sequence. I suppose there is a renaming program out there that could put them into a workable order, but I'd rather not have to do that.

 

That's because by default it tags the layer name at the end of each file your file needs to end in the number sequence. So the easiest thing to do would be to export your layers using the build in script Travis mentioned (wish I had known that one a long time ago) and then use a simple file renaming utility to enumerate your files. filename_XXXX.jpg

 

then premier or any other ap that can load an image sequence won't have a problem.