Troubleshooting and general tips

• The error message “The document does not contain a selection” means the image dimensions are too small. For technical reasons your image needs to be at least 1500px on its shortest side for the script to run.
• The error message “The command Play is not currently available” means actions or scripts are missing when Photoshop tries to run Poser Frames from a droplet or other means of automation. Make sure you’ve followed the installation instructions above. Also, if you have several versions of Photoshop installed, make sure your droplet launches the correct version (the one with Poserframes installed). A workaround is to manually launch the correct version of Photoshop before you run your droplet.
• After having updated to a new major Photoshop version, it seems you need to install the script PoserFrames.jsx in the new /Applications/Photoshop 202x/Presets/Scripts folder, or just move it over from the old folder. Remember to restart Photoshop afterwards and make sure Poser Frames shows up in the menu File/Automate.
• The script is designed to work with images in true 2:3, 4:3, 4:5, 6:7 or 1:1 formats. If your image has a crop that deviate from these aspects ratios it might still run, but the results will look odd.
• The script attempts to determine if your image is in color or in black and white, and then generates scanner artifacts and film burns in color or grey scale accordingly. Sometimes this fails (some black and white images actually contain a little color and some color images happen to have greyscale pixels at the center). If you want to bypass this color check (and speed things up a bit), you can add the keyword color or the keyword bw to the file meta data of your image. This is easily done in Adobe Lightroom CC or Adobe Bridge and those keywords are passed on to exported images.
• If you feel the script is too slow, I’m sorry. I have just not found way to make JavaScript and Photoshop efficient together. The script is written with a progressive disclosure structure, however, which means it will run att different speeds depending on your settings. It will be fastest in crop mode with no added matte and slowest in fancy mode with scanner artifacts and film burn at opposite side turned on.
• Use the settings feather_factor_35mm, feather_factor_645, feather_factor_67_square and feather_factor_45 to control how fuzzy the mask edges and rebate edges appear for each aspect ratio. For most tastes, these settings should be left with their preset values.
• The settings movement_min and movement_max are used together to determine how much the script is allowed to move the image area from the centered position in the scanner mask. For each movement axis, the distance between the centered position and the the most extreme eccentric position is divided into 100 equal units. The scrips generates a random number between movement_min and movement_max and then moves the image that many units from the centered position. Because of this, if you set movement_min and movement_max both to 0, the image area will never move from the centered position. If you set movement_min and movement_max both to 100, the image area will always move to the most extreme position. I use the latter setting myself at times, since I really enjoy that off-center look.
• If you set both movement_min and movement_max to 100, I think it looks best to set artefacts to false.
• I like to run the Film Grain, from the Archetype Process, on my images after I’ve run Poser Frames. That way, the borders blend in nicely with the images. If you have Poser Frames in fancy mode, you may want to remove the grain added to the white areas outside of the border. I use the magic wand in Photoshop, and fill the selection with white.