AlternateIdea

Scripting Photoshop With JavaScript and Ruby

$ rdoc-osa --name 'Adobe Photoshop CS2' --op ~/Documents/PhotoshopRuby

$ rdoc-osa --name 'Adobe Photoshop CS2' --op ~/Documents/PhotoshopRuby --template ./allison/allison.rb

require 'rubygems'
require 'rbosa'

app = OSA.app('Adobe Photoshop CS2')
app.settings.ruler_units = OSA::AdobePhotoshopCS2::E440::PIXEL_UNITS

app.make(OSA::AdobePhotoshopCS2::Document, [], :with_properties => {
  :name => 'Ruby Rocks',
  :width => 500,
  :height => 500
})

require 'rubygems'
require 'rbosa'

app = OSA.app('Adobe Photoshop CS2')
app.settings.ruler_units = OSA::AdobePhotoshopCS2::E440::PIXEL_UNITS
app.instance_eval do
  def create_document(options = {})
    make(OSA::AdobePhotoshopCS2::Document, [], :with_properties => {
       :name => 'Ruby Rocks',
       :width => 500,
       :height => 500
     }.merge(options))
  end

  def add_layer(name, kind)
    kinds = %w(NORMAL GRADIENTFILL PATTERNFILL TEXT SOLIDFILL)
    do_javascript %(  
      var doc = app.activeDocument;
      var layer = doc.artLayers.add();
      layer.name = "#{name || ''}";
      layer.kind = LayerKind.#{kinds.detect {|k| k.downcase == kind} || 'NORMAL'};
      )
    current_document.art_layers[0]
  end
end

app.create_document(:name => 'Schweet')
layer = app.add_layer('A text layer', 'text')
texto  = layer.text_object
texto.size = 40
texto.contents = "This is some text"

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Discussion

1. Damien Tanner said on March 5th

   ... this has made my day.

2. Teej said on March 5th

   This is a great find, I’ll be delving into this later tonight. Thanks!

3. ichigo said on March 5th

   thank you for introducing me to RubyOSA :) I recently stumbled ober rb-appscript but it didn’t feel that rubyish to me. with RubyOSA I feel more comfortable even if it might not be as powerful. thanks a lot.

4. Robin said on March 5th

   How about scripting the gimp :)

   http://www.zweknu.org/blog/index.rhtml?s=p%7C480&c=T&ft=T

5. Grant Hutchins said on March 5th

   Adobe Photoshop CS3 add MATLAB scripting as well, which should be exciting for anyone doing heavy image processing in technical fields.

6. Jamie Hill said on March 5th

   This is great, I spent days trying to figure out the applescript equivilent a couple of years ago.

7. Laurent Sansonetti said on March 5th

   That’s very nice, thank you :-)

8. has said on March 5th

   ichigo: “I recently stumbled ober rb-appscript but it didn’t feel that rubyish to me.”

   Yeah, Ruby and Apple events have distinctly different ways of doing business (OO vs. RPC+queries), so a bit of mismatch is pretty much inevitable. I think folks who design relational-object mappers for relational databases often encounter similar problems (the Apple Event Object Model is partly based on the relational model, btw).

   As you can guess, appscript and RubyOSA deal with this mismatch in different ways. Appscript trades some syntactical Pythonisms/Rubyisms for a level of functionality and application compatibility that’s equal to AppleScript’s (modulo any really rare and obscure application glitches I’ve yet to hear of). It wears the differences on its sleeve, if you like, so can feel a bit strange at first – users soon seem to get used to it though. In contrast, RubyOSA tries to hide away all the differences behind a pure OO facade which gives it a bit more ‘Ruby-ish’ syntax, though it loses some features, is more prone to hidden gotchas, and runs into application compatibility problems more often than AppleScript/appscript. But you pays your moneys and takes your choice.

   ...

   BTW, here’s a pure Ruby version of Justin’s second example using appscript for comparison:

   
    require 'appscript'
   
    PS = Appscript.app('Adobe Photoshop CS2')
    PS.settings.ruler_units.set(:pixel_units)
   
    doc = PS.make(:new => :document, :with_properties => {
           :width => 500,
           :height => 500})
    layer = doc.make(:new => :art_layer, :with_properties => {
           :name => 'A text layer',
           :kind => :text_layer})
    text = layer.text_object
    text.size.set(40)
    text.contents.set("This is some text")
   

   Photoshop’s scripting implementation can be a little quirky at times; if you get stuck, a good place to ask is Apple’s AppleScript-Users mailing list. One thing I’ve changed in my version is that the script no longer names documents when creating them, leaving PS to generate unique names itself. That’s because when PS returns references it likes to identify documents by name, which can cause confusion when two or more documents have the same name. You can sort of get around this by always creating your own references to the frontmost document, but that gets pretty clumsy and it’s cleaner and easier to just use references returned by PS. Adding unique suffixes to your own names would be easy enough though, e.g.:

   
    name = 'Schweet'
    existing_names = PS.documents.name.get
    if existing_names.include?(name)
       i = 1
       i += 1 while existing_names.include?(name = "#{name}-#{i}")
    end
   

   HTH

   has

9. has said on March 5th

   (With apologies for length, bad Textile escaping [’=>’ should’ve been ’=>‘], etc.:)

10. Mark said on March 5th

    RubyOSA rocks!

    Thanks for the interesting example of how it can be used to script Photoshop. We hacked together a version of the Marshmallow bot a while back that broadcasts into Campfire your currently playing iTunes song title and link to the lyrics, just to get our feet wet with RubyOSA. We called it Kumbaya.

    I’m excited about the possibility of the next iteration of the Mac OS using RubyOSA as it’s scripting language-of-choice and interested in seeing what other cool things people are doing with it.

    Thanks again and keep hacking!

11. Bramus! said on March 6th

    For the windows users this article on Scripting Photoshop I wrote about a year ago might come in handy.

    Has a C# code example just after the first pic.

12. Justin Palmer said on March 6th

    Has, thanks for the example with rb-appscript. Short and sweet!

    Can you tell me the why you explicitly define `get` and `set` when ruby handles these perfectly fine (e.g. def text=(txt)) ?

13. has said on March 6th

    Justin: “Can you tell me the why you explicitly define `get` and `set` when ruby handles these perfectly fine”

    Oh man, you had to ask. ;) I started writing a response here but it was turning into an essay, and seeing as it’s something that does get asked from time to time I’ve finally stuck it on its own page over at the appscript site:

    http://rb-appscript.rubyforge.org/faq.html

    It’s kind of a long story, as to really understand the ‘why appscript does X’ one needs to understand a bit about how Apple events work, and what makes them so different to the other IPC systems that most folks are more familiar with.

    The brief answer is that there are very good technical reasons for doing it, not least “that’s the way that Apple events actually work, after all”. Not that I didn’t also spend a lot of hours trying to think of a viable way to make it all work ‘implicitly’ (like in AppleScript) back when I originally started (Python) appscript. However, it just wasn’t possible without making compromises elsewhere; compromises that would have stopped appscript from working as well as AppleScript, and were therefore judged unacceptable. And FWIW, three years on and plenty other hard-knock lessons later, I’m confident I made the right decision on this issue at least, though I daresay the education/awareness side could still be better.

    (In fact, there were already two other Python-AE bridges available at the time; it was dissatisfaction with those that made me roll up my sleeves and write appscript myself. I may not know much about programming, but, as a longtime AppleScript ‘expert’, I know what I like.:)

    Anyway, go read the appscript ‘FAQ’ page, and if your brain is still working by the end of it, go check out the two papers mentioned at the end of it (they’re on the links page) if you want to learn more. And if you’ve any other questions, feel free to ask away (though if you could maybe manage some simple ones next time…<g>)

    HTH

    has

14. Tieg said on March 10th

    This rules! There’s also another Ruby-AppleScript bridge called RubyAEOSA, but it’s deprecated and not so Ruby-ish.

15. Scott Mackenzie said on March 11th

    Can you see my socks? No! They’re long gone.

    I had no idea you could do this type of thing. Particularly like the idea of running actions once a new document is set up.

    And I suppose you can run save actions?

16. Justin Palmer said on March 12th

    Scott, you can do that and more.

    However, on the topic your talking about you can have actions auto run for specific Photoshop events by going to File->Scripts->Scripts Events Manager.

    From there you can select from different types of events and what scripts or actions to run when an event occurs (e.g. New Document created).

17. jonas said on March 15th

    Nice but there are so many COM references to photoshop already out there on the web but has any one managed to save their master pieces it the one stumbling block thats got me stumped.

    I managed to code a few line of pure ruby but couldnt save it at resorted back to javascript

18. grand Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Type: text/html Su... said on March 17th

    t1993@encytemedia.com

19. sharthe8253@encytemedia.com Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Conte... said on March 18th

    en2090@encytemedia.com

20. qsbpd5g7tt said on March 20th

    ei2uisk1ffqrr drqhcpyk3tnms8snj vlusxmpglhre

21. Sven said on March 27th

    wow – interesting article. Until now I work with PHP but I think Ruby is the future.

    Greetings from Germany Sven

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