Help – Scaling selections in an action

J
Posted By
john
Mar 31, 2009
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376
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4
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Closed
As part of an action in CS4 I select can stroke a line all round an image to make a simple frame. The images can differ in size but that is no problem in the action.

I would like to be able to add a second stroke outside the original one. If I just expand the selection I wind up with rounded corners when I want square ones.

It appears that the selection / transform tools should work but I cannot see any way to increase a selection by a uniform amount on each side say 40 pixels. Scaling a rectangular selection by a fixed % does not give an even spacing.

Any ideas how to do this.

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RG
Roy G
Mar 31, 2009
<john @ world.com> wrote in message
As part of an action in CS4 I select can stroke a line all round an image to make a simple frame. The images can differ in size but that is no problem in the action.

I would like to be able to add a second stroke outside the original one. If I just expand the selection I wind up with rounded corners when I want square ones.

It appears that the selection / transform tools should work but I cannot see any way to increase a selection by a uniform amount on each side say 40 pixels. Scaling a rectangular selection by a fixed % does not give an even spacing.

Any ideas how to do this.

Have a look at "Image" – "Canvas Size" – "Relative".

Roy G
J
jaSPAMc
Mar 31, 2009
john @ world.com found these unused words:

As part of an action in CS4 I select can stroke a line all round an image to make a simple frame. The images can differ in size but that is no problem in the action.

I would like to be able to add a second stroke outside the original one. If I just expand the selection I wind up with rounded corners when I want square ones.

It appears that the selection / transform tools should work but I cannot see any way to increase a selection by a uniform amount on each side say 40 pixels. Scaling a rectangular selection by a fixed % does not give an even spacing.

Any ideas how to do this.

Deselect, then re-select between the steps?
J
john
Mar 31, 2009
On Tue, 31 Mar 2009 18:03:13 +0100, "Roy G"
wrote:

<john @ world.com> wrote in message
As part of an action in CS4 I select can stroke a line all round an image to make a simple frame. The images can differ in size but that is no problem in the action.

I would like to be able to add a second stroke outside the original one. If I just expand the selection I wind up with rounded corners when I want square ones.

It appears that the selection / transform tools should work but I cannot see any way to increase a selection by a uniform amount on each side say 40 pixels. Scaling a rectangular selection by a fixed % does not give an even spacing.

Any ideas how to do this.

Have a look at "Image" – "Canvas Size" – "Relative".
Roy G

Thank you. That can be made to work. I had not thought of using this round about way but in an action it is simple.

I have often wondered why there was no "expand with square corners" in the selection menu. Guess I will not need it now

John
JF
John Forest
Apr 3, 2009
If you want to apply a stroke of a different color as the second stroke you could proceed as follows:

1 Select all

2 Stroke with the color you want to be closest to the image. Make this stroke as wide as the width of the two strokes together. Set the stroke to be inside the boundary.

3 Stroke with the second color with the width you want for the outer stroke.

As an example, suppose you want to put a white border around the image and surround that with a black border. (This looks good on a print.) If you wanted each border to be 20 pixels wide you would stroke first with the white at 40 pixels, and then stroke again with 20 pixels. This will be easy to do as an action. Just record the steps as you do it once and save it as an action.

This presumes that you don’t mind that the stroke cuts into the edges of the original image.

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