Painting in PS actions

[Mindbender]

I'm trying to better my abilities with creating actions in Photoshop and ran across something perplexing. I know there are certain things that can't be directly recorded into action, and you can use the "insert" command from the actions palate to add them (the manual specifically says painting and modal tools)... but what I'm trying to do is record painting pixels. Does anyone know how you could go about this or am I just chasing the proverbial goose here? It's not mission critical at the moment, but if I have to completely for go painting tools it changes how I would build things drastically in some cases. It's weird because they say you can't use painting tools for direct recording, bu the tool selection itself is recorded. Adobe just needs to release a full on scripting engine for Photoshop, it's overdue.

Any help or chastisments welcome. :})

T.I.A.

[Greg Vander Houwen]

I'm not a big action user but I think you could save a path that could be stroked. That may be actionable.

Or not ;).

Greg

[davecross]

It is possible to "pause" the action long enought to do some painting. When you record the action, it will, as you said, record the fact that you're clicking on the Brush tool, plus brush size and color. Paint something - it won't record that - and continue recording the ret of your action.
Then go in to the action and just after the step that says select brush (or set foreground color), from the palette popup menu choose Insert Stop.
Type something in there if you like, such as "Paint" and click OK.
Now when you run the action it will do all your inital steps but will stop and a dialogue box will say paint. Click Stop, do your painting, then hit the Play button to continue.
Needless to say, it's not fully auotmatic but it's about the closest thing I've found to automating painting
HTH

[Mindbender]

Greg's got a point, you COULD I suppose create vector objects and stroke, fill, etc. those since creating them is a scriptable event I believe... but what a pain. heh.

The reason this actually came up in the first place was that I was building an action to send to someone and the process I use involves a couple steps of actually painting on layers to create highlights and such on an object. Obviously it didn't work out quite right. heh. Maybe I could just make a selection in the right shapes and feather/fill/etc. those. Still not a great solution.

More than anything, I was curious if it was possible since I didn't see anything right away in the interface or the docs. I think we've pretty much established that you can't. ;)

Thanks for the input.

[strych9ine]

If seen Dave's process in a lot of actions... it seems to work fine.

I am known around here for my helpful input, btw. *forehead slap* :6