While at Kelling Heath Autumn Star Party last weekend, I was very intrigued by the title of one of the talks on the Saturday afternoon. Photoshop Processing Using Scripts.
The talk was presented by Paul Julier, a member of Loughton Astronomical Society.
Scripts in Photoshop was something I hadn’t really stumbled across before. I was aware there was a scripts option in a drop-down menu, often used to load images into a single stack. So it looks like it also has other purposes! Intriguing.
Always keen to learn something new, and pass techniques onto others, I attended the talk.
Paul announced that he had written a number of Astrophotography Photoshop Scripts and he demonstrated their potential in processing astrophotographs within Photoshop. Unlike Actions, the scripts use mathematical formulae to work out the best option for each photograph and can process a number of open images at the same time. This can cut the time of your workflow enormously and make processing images a whole lot easier.
WOW!
Paul said that he would like to collaborate with others, perhaps forming a community project, where his scripts could be freely shared. More importantly, he would be able to offer advice to others (like me) who have no idea how this all works, but would like to learn how to write scripts.
So we decided to reach out to others and get the concept onto my Web site to see if there were other like-minded people out there and build up a whole raft of scripts to share round. As more people get on board, it would be fantastic if people upload their scripts to share amongst the community, or help others improve their scripts going forward.
After a discussion Paul and I come to the conclusion that we could work together to spread the word and get others involved.
As I have the Web page capacity to do so, Paul has now sent me his scripts.
These are now freely available for everyone to download by right-clicking the link below:
Paul Julier’s Adobe Photoshop Scripts.
Paul has put quite a few scripts into this Zip file.
He admits that they need a little bit more refinement, but they’re good to go already.
Once downloaded, unzip the files and copy the jsx files into the folder:
C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CC 2018\Presets\Scripts\
If you have an earlier version of Photoshop, this folder path will be slightly different.
Any jsx files in this folder will automatically appear in the Files/Scripts drop-down menu within Photoshop so they can be instantly selected.
Scripts is all new territory for me, but Paul is going to lead me through this next week, so I have a much better understanding of it all. Hopefully I will then be able to start producing some of my own, and helping to spread the word to others on my workshops.
Paul has written a pdf document outlining what he has already done with these scripts.
This can be downloaded by right-clicking the link below:
PaulJulierScripts.pdf
So if you’ve got an interest in joining us in our online community project, or have a lot of experience in producing Adobe scripts for astrophotography, and would like to be involved to help others, please do get in touch with us.
Cheers.
Dave
dave@star-gazing.co.uk