Manipulate an Image with Scripting in photoshop 2

Step 4:

Now I will show you how to define colors using hexadecimal codes, colors can be defined in other ways like by RGB values as we will see later. Here we will define



a white color and a black color then set black as the foreground and white as the background. There is other ways of doing this but for the purpose of this tutorial I will show you this way. The code for this step is:

var white = new SolidColor(); white.rgb["hexValue"] = "ffffff" var black = new SolidColor(); black.rgb["hexValue"] = "000000" foregroundColor = black; backgroundColor = white;

You will notice here that the first two lines are roughly the same as the second and third; what we are doing here is setting up a variable which can be named anything but here we use the color it will contain as the variable name. We are then saying that this variable is equal to new SolidColor() which is a function for creating a new color. The next line is setting the hexadecimal value for this color to whatever the color should be so for white this is "ffffff", what we are ultimately saying here is that white is the color white and black is the color black.
The last two lines set the foreground color to black and the background color to white, and are fairly easy to look at and understand straight away. In Photoshop the equivalent action for doing this would just be to hit D to reset the colors.
Try now, setting the foreground color and background color to a random color manually then running the full script which should give you the same result as we got in step 3 but now the foreground and background colors will be set properly.

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Step 5:

Now we are going to fill the background layer white using the white color we set up in the last step. For this we first need to make a selection around the whole document then fill that selection. The code for this is:

docRef_1.selection.selectAll(); docRef_1.selection.fill(white); docRef_1.selection.deselect();

The first line creates a selection using the selectAll() function, for any command that can be used on different documents we have to tell Photoshop which document we are working on even though we only have one open in this case.
The second line is telling Photoshop to fill this selection in with the white color. Sometimes it is confusing as it wouldn't be stupid to think that something like docRef_1.selction.fill = white would do what we are trying to do, but this isn't a real command and this is where ESTK comes in useful as it will point out the correct use of something like the fill command just by typing in fill.
The third line is fairly self explanatory, it will deselect the selection, exactly the same as hitting Ctrl+D in Photoshop.
Again test the script and you should end up with a white background layer and the image in the layer above. In Photoshop, all this could have been done using Ctrl+A then Shift+F5 to select all then fill the selection.

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Step 6:

In the next two steps we will use a script to find the average color in the photograph; we will then use this information to decide how to edit the image. This part of the script could have lots of other uses for example you could use a similar script to create a color chart based on the colors that make up the image. In this step we will first duplicate the image layer then we will apply an average blur filter which will find the average color then fill the layer with that color. The code for doing this is:

docRef_1.layers[0].duplicate(); docRef_1.activeLayer = docRef_1.layers[0]; docRef_1.activeLayer.applyAverage();

The first line looks familiar, we used the same command in step 3 but here we have replaced backgroundLayer with layers[0]. To understand this we need to know a bit about arrays in JavaScript. Arrays are simply just variables which hold more than one value, where variables are like boxes with a single piece of information, arrays are like a big boxes with lots of smaller boxes labelled zero to infinity inside. For example if you wanted to create an array holding the first three days of the week you would type:

var days = ["Monday", "Tuesday", "Wednesday"]

Now if you wanted to use the first day of the week you would use the code:

days[0]

This would equal "Monday"
Obviously don't include these last two lines in your script. Now that you know a bit about arrays we can go back to the three lines of code we added. In the first line layers is an array which includes all the layers in our document. The top layer in the stack is always the first in the array, corresponding to layers[0] because arrays start at 0 instead of 1.
The second line sets the active layer to the top layer this is the same as selecting a layer in the layer panel in Photoshop. We didn't need to change the active layer but it makes things easier later on.
The last line applies the average blur, the format here is the same as most of the commands we have used so far and is what's called a method and usually takes the form of document.layer.function where the layer is the active layer and the function is applying the average blur. This can be done in Photoshop by going filter>blur>average.
Again, test the script and you should have a new layer above the image filled with a solid color.

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