Topic awaiting preservation: Help on using the Background Eraser when recording actions (Page 1 of 1)

I've tried recording actions in which one of the steps is a single click of the background eraser in both 7 and CS and haven't had any luck getting it to work. It will record selecting the tool, but not the actual act of clicking to erase the background. This seems weird because the Magic Eraser works just fine. Any ideas?

It doesn't work that way. every picture you run the action on is likely to be different so the program has no way of knowing what the background will be in each case. So it will wait for you to make a selection before continueing with the rest of the instructions in the action

Hmmm...that's what I was afraid of. I wish there was a way to set a pixel location for a large background eraser to click everytime - the images I am working with are all 95% black. Unfortunately the magic eraser doesn't clean up the edges nearly as nicely. Is there a plug-in or chain of filters that might create a similar effect?
Thanks for the input!

Well there is one way it can be done. Creating a selection is recordable, as is converting a selction to a path. So what you do is create a small selection 1-4 pixels, then from the paths submenu use "Make Work Path" to convert that selections to a path. Then simply stroke the path using the background brush. Might not be perfect and all the edits would need to be in the same location on each image.

I have used something similar, only with the rubber stamp, to remove props and set reflection from the background of a 100 or so jewerly shots. Just rember the you must set the pick-points as for the rubberstamp as part of the action. But if all the edits are the same it can be a time saver.

The technique has potental and could be modified to be semi automated for some instances buy using select color range, quick masking, or by some other automated masking technique.

J. Stuart J.



(Edited by jstuartj on 11-16-2004 08:41)

Thanks so much - I'll give that a shot!