Photoshop Scripting. Opening & Saving overlapping image stacks

[jsgillard]

I’ve been getting more and more into star photography and have recently been trying to develop a new style of stacking the photos and creating time-lapse videos from the stacked photos.

Example: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBE3vUb-dtE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBE3vUb-dtE “Example video”)

This process took absolutely forever to accomplish and I’ve been trying my hardest to write a script to help me automate the process. Each frame is a stack of up to 25 images, then the next frame is an overlapping stack of images, only offset by 1 or 2 photos.
Can anyone please assist me is writing a Photoshop script to accomplish the following?
After taking my time-lapse photos, I am left with a single folder with an image sequence of anywhere between 50 & 1800 photos.

Ideal Setup:

1) Open Photoshop and run a script “Stacked Timelapse”

2) A Dialog box prompts me for the Source ImageSequence folder. It also prompts me for the maximum length of the stacked star trails (Max number of images to stack per frame).
Ideally it would have some text with recommended settings.

For example:

“0-299 images = Recommended Length of 25”

“300-599 images = Recommended length of 40”

“600+ images = Recommended length of 60”

3) Once you click GO, the script will begin importing the photos into a Stack, applying the ‘.blendMode = BlendMode.LIGHTEN;” to all the layers, then save to a new subfolder (we can call it “Stack”) with the filenames “0001.jpg, 0002.jpg, 0003.jpg, etc” (using max jpg quality settings)

To accomplish the effect in the video, you have to follow this image quantity and offset.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50801/StarFileStructure.jpg

Can anyone give me some pointers on how to script and accomplish this?

Thanks in advance!

[Author]

Posts