Need some advice on creating a PS action....

What I want to do is create a PS action that would be able to add a designated background to a masked PSD file. For instance, if I photograph 10 basketball teams but we aren't able to do the photos on the court because it's being used, so I shoot them on a chroma key BG and cut them out with the intention of adding a "court" background.

Once I have all of the masking done, I generally batch downsize everything a small amount so that they are all of uniform size making it easy to just add the new BG into each photo (I generally downsize because the largest I'm going to print would be 8x10). Here is where I would like to run an action to add the BG instead of having to open all of the files back up and add/save manually. Any suggestions?

jra wrote in post #18517975
Any suggestions?

I'm not an expert on this but would think you could have a separate action for each separate background.

Bring them in from File - Place Embedded.

As long as you do not move the background files / folders, it should work.

Consider using a color range mask set for the chroma key BG. You should be able to record an action that added the needed layers and add the color mask.

https://helpx.adobe.co​m …e-replace-background.html

If I'm reading this correctly, you really want to run this in batch...

You want to start a batch job that will take all your individual shots that are already masked and drop the background in as a bottom layer?

Do you trust your cutouts enough that you don't want to look at each and see if they need adjusted?
I've run into a similar situation on shooting teams and I only did it for the group images...way to much work for what I was charging to do it for the individuals. My .02.

If this is a one time thing, I would suspect it would be easier to just paste the image as a lower layer for each file, and verify you get the results you want, then save them out, than to try to figure out an action and keep running it on your files until it is right.

If this is something you want to do on an ongoing basis, then it might be worth the effort to have an action to resize, create a layer under your mask, and drop in a designated "background" file.

You nailed it Dagolmaging....I'm pretty efficient and detailed at masking and I do trust them enough to run a batch afterwards. Of course, I would go through and check each one before calling it final and should a fix be needed, I could still do that. I just need to figure out how to make an action that points to a certain file (the BG I want) and drop it into each photo.

It is an ongoing thing TeamSpeed. I've been doing it for years by just opening each file and manually dropping in a background and saving and that can get quite tedious and time consuming when I'm dealing with 100+ photos. I'm not really concerned about automating the masking process but something as simple as dropping in a background layer seems like it should be pretty easy to automate.

Ok....with some experimentation, I figured it out. I wanted to share in case it could come in handy for anyone else. This is after the masking is done and everything has been re-sized to a uniform size. First create a blank layer, make it a smart layer and then replace contents with the BG file of choice. The action records the location of the BG file...of course, that step would need to be changed as needed but that's not really a big deal. As I figured, it was pretty simple, I was just initially thinking about it the wrong way (an action can't seem to record a drag and drop).