Well, once again it seems that Adobe cheated us in CS3 – we’ve been begging for Conditional Actions in Photoshop for years now. What are Conditional Actions you may ask? A Conditional Action would be an action that is smart enough to handle if conditions. Lets say you have a folder of Landscape and Portrait oriented photographs – you would either need to run your action on them separately or use ImageReady. ImageReady you may ask? Where is it? Adobe decided to do away with it in CS3. So let me get this straight, now I don’t even have the option to go into it and run Conditionals. Nice.
I must say that I have never had the need to use ImageReady since I upgraded to CS3. Wow, I’m shocked that it is gone. Now how will I make my blinking, fireball, dancing baby animated gifs for client webpages? This is truly upsetting.
Oh well – awesome Photoshop community to the rescue! Sivaratnam Gunaratnam has created a script for Photoshop CS2 (which works in CS3) that lets you set a basic conditional. Now this is not the end all script to solve the problem, but it sure is a lot of help. Right now Siva’s script will let you set one conditional and if the condition is met run an action in your action palette. If not, run another action in your action palette (or no action at all). You can set conditions like height/width (is, is not, greater than, not greater than), file type, file size, RGB/CMYK, filename, exif, etc.. Recently I’ve been using ‘If Height is not greater than Width’, which is your basic way to differentiate between Landscape and Portrait images. Pretty clever.
Okay, you still need to create two sets of actions for this. One for each condition. I have an action that resizes my landscape oriented images and an action that resizes my portrait oriented images. It would be very nice to still have conditionals like ImageReady used to have so I can have one Action for each condition, but beggars can’t be choosers.
Lastly, some features commonly found in actions are just not available in the script. For example, changing the file name, overriding save actions, etc.. You *MUST* record the action to save to a specified location. Not too big of a deal, I have a folder on my scratch drive that the script dumps images into, I rename them first inside of Bridge, run the action, they get funneled into this folder and I move them out.
So, if you want conditionals – check out this script. Siva says a version 2 is in the works, but like most unpaid projects who knows when we may see it. I’d be willing to throw some green to the project to see a new version with a lot more features, but even more, I’d like to see Adobe finally get on the ball and give us Conditionals within Photoshop!
Thanks Siva!
Link: http://sivaratnam.googlepages.com/