Photoshop and images sequences

[Thomas M.]

I have a big problem here. For a client I created a still image with a fish. The client wants a small animation of the fish for another ad. Now, to get the look of the fish I used about 12 different CC layer, using also screen, overlay, etc. as layer styles for the color corrections. Some of the CC layers are masked to restrict the corrections to certain areas. I also start in 32bit to combine several LW layers to have control of the light intensities (also with small CC corrections). Afterwards I collapsed the 32bit files, saved it out as 16bit and did the big color corrections.

In Photoshop it's no problem, but how the .... do I switch the single frames to do this for the whole animation. Doing batch processing with actions is a piece of cake in PS as long as you are working with one image, but so far I failed to exchange fish_00000, alpha_00000, alphaflag_00000 with fish_00001, alpha_00001, alphaflag_00001.

PS loads one file incremental, but not the other two. What's wrong? I although tried to do this in AE, but with the layer stiles for the CC layers and masks for whole folders it simply doesn't work. Is Premiere an alternative? I couldn't find Hue and Saturation in Premiere, also it wouldn't load .hdrs.

So how do I force PS to batch process several image sequences into one sequence? It shouldn't be that tough?!

Cheers
Thomas

[raw-m]

Just a long-shot as I haven't do this in a while - in Photoshop (CS3+), can't you open your files as an "image seq" and work as normal, spot checking what you've done by scrolling through the "Animation" timeline? You can then export in the flavour you want...

Using After Effects would be a much better option.

[Thomas M.]

Unfortunately you can't open .hdrs as an image sequence. I tried it with 8bit though, but couldn't get the alpha image sequence to mask off my image or CC layers.

It would be so easy if I could get PS to load the different images one after the other.

[raw-m]

Perhaps there is something you can do with Smart Objects, somehow stacking them up in the timeline and then exporting?

[Thomas M.]

But isn't there a way to batch process this thing? My big question is: How to load 3 images with increasing frame number to do the same action over and over again until the whole series is processed? Does one need to script this?

[Silkrooster]

Take your sequence turn it into a smart object then apply any effect to it and it will be applied to all images in that sequence.
If necessary you could flatten the layers and save under a new name for each image. With a sequence it probably would be best to use an action so you can just let it run through each image. Always, always work on a back up. Never the originals. If anything happened to the action such as saving over top of the originals you would get steamed really quick. Best thing to do is copy the entire folder to new location and if possible backup to external drive. Odds are it will go smoothly, but you just never know.

[Thomas M.]

Thanks Silkrooster, but unfortunately images sequences won't work with .hdr in PS and setting up an image sequence as a mask, be it regular image sequence or smart image sequence, seems to be impossible (unless there is a trick I haven't seen).

Without being able to use mask sequences the whole thing doesn't work.

Cheers
Thomas

[Revanto]

Have you considered batch processing? That way, you can apply the action to a number of sequences.

The other option is to use an Excel spreadsheet to drive your changes in Photoshop. Here's a link that may help:

http://www.tutorialkit.com/tutorials/Using-Photoshop-and-Excel-together-to-create-data-driven-images.-86647.html

Good luck and hope things work out for you.

Cheers,
Revanto :p