Hands on: Automate common tasks

According to a UK bathrooms retailer, people spend more than a year and a half in the loo in a lifetime.

Naturally, it’s a little longer for women, but men spend more time than they used to in the loo too, clocking up an impressive one and three-quarter hours a week, which adds up about two weeks of your life down the pan.

If you’re looking for tips on how to cut down on your bathroom visits without compromising on personal hygiene, I’m afraid I can’t help. What I’m trying to say is that we all spend a lot of time, possibly more than we realise, doing the same thing repeatedly.

In the case of photo editing at least, you can cut out a lot of repetition by using scripts to automate common photo-editing tasks such as resizing pictures, converting file formats or adding a digital watermark.

Many people avoid scripting because they think it will be complicated. But recording a script often involves little more than pressing a Record button prior to doing whatever it was you were planning on doing in the first place. And once done, you’ll never have to do it again.

This month, I take a look at some of the things you can do with scripting, including which applications support scripting and where you can download ready-made scripts for common and not so common photo-editing tasks.

Photo editors that support scripting include Adobe Photoshop, Corel Paint Shop Pro, Ulead Photo Impact and Gimp. And Photoshop Elements will also play (but not record) Photoshop Actions - more about that later.

Photoshop Actions
As well as providing the means for the recording and playback of scripts, applications usually come with a supply of ready-made scripts for you to try, which can usually be adapted to suit your specific requirements. You’ll find Photoshop’s Actions in the Actions palette. In all likelihood, you’ll find something here that does what you want - there are several folders of actions, including image effects, frames, text effects and textures. If you can’t see these folders in the Actions palette, select them from the Actions palette pop-up menu.

Paint Shop Pro scripts
To see Paint Shop Pro scripts, select View, Toolbars, Script to display the Scripts toolbar. All the available scripts are displayed in the pop-up menu. They include the One Step Photo Fix and Smart Photo Fix options normally accessed from the Adjust menu. There are also scripts for adding edges and frames, applying effects, channel splitting and Exif captioning, among others. I’ll take a brief look at recording and editing Paint Shop Pro scripts towards the end.

Gimp Scripts Fu
Gimp scripts use a scripting language called Script-Fu, a dialect of a Lisp variant called Scheme. If that means anything to you, you’ll be looking forward to editing Gimp scripts and writing your own. If it doesn’t, don’t worry, there’s a growing library of Gimp scripts that are easy to install and use.

Unlike the other applications mentioned here, Gimp doesn’t allow you to record commands to create a script, so unless you can write your own, you’re limited to downloading and using existing scripts written by others. Being open source, there’s no shortage of these. Windows Gimp 2.4 scripts are located in C:/Program Files/GIMP-2.0/share/gimp/2.0/scripts, (if Gimp isn’t installed on your C drive, substitute the appropriate drive letter in the path) or in the location specified in the Folders/scripts section of the Preferences panel.

Because the menu location of Gimp scripts is determined by the author and they tend not to be put in the same place, they can be difficult to track down. Open the script file you’re looking for, and on the last line you’ll see something like this:

(script-fu-menu-register “script-fu-old-photo”
“<Image>/Filters/Decor”)

This tells you what the script is called and where to find it. If you still can’t see it on the appropriate menu, tell Gimp to read the script locations by selecting Toolbox, Xtns, Script-Fu, Refresh scripts.

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