[If you’d like to download the image used in this tutorial to practice these techniques, click here. We’ve also included a before and after for you to compare the results. All files are for practice purposes only.]

1 OPEN THE IMAGE TO BE SHARPENED
Let’s start things off with a photograph that requires sharpening. I captured this image with a Leica D-Lux 3 out the window of my car. In the course of touring the back roads of South Dakota’s Black Forest, we were suddenly surrounded by a few hundred mostly peaceful bison, and this guy in particular was close enough to touch (were I endowed with really stretchy Mr. Fantastic arms). The resulting image is soft with striated noise patterns and wandering colors. If I just set about sharpening him, I’d bring out the bad detail along with the good. Fortunately, smart objects provide a more selective if somewhat laborious approach.

Photo Credit: ©DEKE MCCLELLAND

2 CONVERT LAYER TO A SMART OBJECT
Photoshop provides a handful of commands that convert an image to a smart object. But for my money, the most convenient method is to click the little doodad in the top-right corner of the Layers panel and choose Convert to Smart Object. (It works for multilayer images, too.) Go ahead and rename the new layer something meaningful like “Bison.” Now your converted and named image is ready to receive nondestructive smart filters.

3 APPLY SMART SHARPEN
To sharpen the creature, choose Filter>Sharpen>Smart Sharpen. Then set the Amount to 350%, Radius to 4.0 pixels, and Remove to Lens Blur. After clicking OK, double-click the tiny slider icon to the right of the words “Smart Sharpen” in the Layers panel and change the Mode setting to Luminosity. This focuses the attention on the detail in the image rather than exaggerating the discrepancies between color channels—always a good idea when sharpening. Leave the Opacity set to 100% and click OK. Tip: Delete the empty filter mask because it just takes up room. When you do need a mask, it’s easier to create it on the fly, as you’ll soon see.

4 SMOOTH COLOR WITH MEDIAN
Sharpening did my bison some good, but it also brought out anomalous color patches in the fur. What’s needed is a generous pass of the Median filter. Choose Filter>Noise>Median, raise the Radius to a hefty 50 pixels, and click OK. As a rule, smoothing should be applied before sharpening so drag the Median filter below Smart Sharpen in the Layers panel. Double-click the slider icon to the right of “Median” in the Layers panel. (Photoshop warns you that you won’t be able to preview the effects.) Change the Mode to Color to smooth over the considerable coloring problems, and click OK to render the smoothing and sharpening effects together.

5 FIND BEST CHANNEL TO USE FOR MASK
Smoothing out the color works nicely inside the bizarrely (and inaccurately) multicolored bison, but it eliminates all hint of color in the background. What’s needed is a filter mask that exposes the bison and protects the grass. Turn off the Eye icon in front of the words “Smart Filters” in the Layers panel to restore the original image, which we’ll need to build a mask. Click the Channels tab and click the various channels to find the one with the highest degree of contrast between foreground and background. For most people and mammal shots, this is going to be Red.

6 EXAGGERATE CONTRAST IN CHANNEL
Duplicate the Red channel by dragging it onto the Create New Channel icon at the bottom of the panel. Double-click the name (in our case, Red copy) and call it “Mask.” When the mask is complete, the bison should be white and the background black. So press Command-I (PC: Ctrl-I) to invert the colors. Next we need to exaggerate the contrast. Choose Image>Adjustments>Levels. Raise the black point value to 70 and lower the white point value to 190 to draw out the bison from its background. Click OK to complete the effect.

7 LOAD THE MASK AS A SELECTION
Your mask isn’t going to win any awards for accuracy. And if you have some extra time on your hands, you could finesse it using the Dodge and Burn tools or the like. But this quick-and-dirty mask nicely highlights the areas of major color drift and fur detail, making it good enough for our purposes. To load the mask, press the Command key (PC: Ctrl) and click the Mask thumbnail in the Channels panel. Now you’re ready to apply the mask to the filters.

8 OPEN THE IMAGE TO BE SHARPENED
Click the RGB thumbnail in the Channels panel to return to the color composite image. Then click the Layers tab to return to the Layers panel. Turn on the Eye icon in front of the words “Smart Filters.” Then Control-click (PC: Right-click) “Smart Filters” and choose Add Filter Mask. Photoshop limits the Median and Smart Sharpen effects to the interior of the bison and protects the prairie grass in the background.

9 DELETE UNUSED CHANNEL
One of the great things about smart objects is that they make efficient use of file size. This particular image was 15.4 MB flat and 15.4 MB after the addition of the two nondestructive smart filters. It’s only when you start adding masks that the file size balloons. We have two masks, one alpha channel and the other a filter mask, so the file size has grown to 25.7 MB. The two masks are identical, so there’s no reason to keep them both. Go to the Channels panel and drag the Mask channel (not the italicized Filter Mask item) to the Trash. The file size drops to 20.5 MB.

10 OPEN SMART OBJECT IN NEW WINDOW
I’m glad to have brought back the colors in the grass. But I’m not so keen on limiting the sharpening effect to the animal. Plus we need to address the horizontal noise patterns at work in the shadow detail. This means applying a couple more filters, neither of which benefit from the existing filter mask. The solution is to create a nested smart object—a smart object inside a smart object—to accommodate the unmasked filters. Back inside the Layers panel, double-click on the Bison smart object thumbnail to open it in a new window (presumably called Layer 01.psb after the temporary file Photoshop creates to accommodate the smart object).

11 CONVERT SMART OBJECT TO SMART OBJECT
You’ll see the original, unedited version of the photograph on a standard Background layer, with all pixels available for editing. Bring up the Layers panel menu and once again choose Convert to Smart Object. Then rename the layer “You’re in the SO!” This way you’ll know where you are if you accidentally enter the smart object. While this adds to the complexity of the file, quite amazingly, it adds nothing to the file size. In fact, the Adobe engineers I talked to endorse this technique and told me there is currently no limit to how deeply you can nest smart objects.

12 APPLY REDUCE NOISE
To downplay the striated noise pattern, choose Filter>Noise>Reduce Noise. Then change the Strength value to 8, Preserve Details to 20%, Reduce Color Noise to 15%, and Sharpen Details to 0%, all of which conspire to smooth away most of the noise without altogether ruining the good detail. Make sure the Remove JPEG Artifact checkbox is turned off and then click OK to apply the filter.

13 APPLY HIGH PASS FOR EDGE CONTRAST
You don’t need the filter mask so drag it to the Trash in the Layers panel. Next we want to add a little bit of edge contrast, in part to sharpen the prairie grass but also to generally enhance the image detail. Choose Filter>Other>High Pass, set the Radius value to 20 pixels, and click OK. Double-click the tiny slider icon to the right of the words High Pass in the Layers panel. Drop out the grays by changing the Mode setting to Soft Light. Then reduce the Opacity value to 50% and click OK. The result is just enough sharpness to offset the effects of the Reduce Noise filter.

14 ENJOY THE RESULTS AND FLEXIBILITY
Close and save the nested smart object. Moments later, you’ll see the meticulously sharpened result thanks to a combination of four filters working nondestructively aided by two smart objects, one nested inside the other. It takes some effort to sharpen an image with this degree of control and accuracy, but the results are worth the effort. And you can modify the filter settings without fear of harming the quality of the image. Smart objects aren’t perfect, but with some planning and slightly more patience, you can establish flexible compositions that permit you to apply filters and adjust their order and settings in any way you see fit.

But in truth, you never need worry about whether a translucency-imbued illustration will print. Illustrator has been known to throw some tricky output instructions, and a dozen different PostScript RIPs might very well screw up those instructions in a dozen different ways. But there is always an arbitrator (not to mention, enabler) of an illustration’s printability, and that’s Photoshop.

In this article, we’ll take a crude digital photo of my youngest son, Sammy, banging on a hopelessly busted piano (below top) and transform it into a work of otherworldly, vector-based weirdness (below bottom). The primary instrument of this transformation will be the Transparency panel in Illustrator. But while Illustrator can belt out a medley, can it carry a tune? The answer is, yes, so long as Photoshop produces.

[If you’d like to download the Illustrator file used in this tutorial to practice these techniques, click here]

STEP 1: Changing the Opacity of an Attribute
Our job is to dress the photograph of Sammy in vectors so he looks like a Liberace-/Elton John-/Phantom of the Opera-type character. Having already imported the photo of Sammy into Illustrator and establishing a few base objects, we’ll start things off by styling Sammy’s vector-based jacket. Let’s say we want the orange fill of the jacket to be translucent, so we can see through it to the stage elements behind young Sam. But if we reduce the Opacity value of the path to, say, 50%, we change Fill and Stroke alike, making the stroke look weak and just plain bad. The trick is to select the Fill attribute independently in the Appearance panel (Window>Appearance). Twirl open the For You! layer, then the jacket layer, then the suit layer. Target the path sublayer containing the portion of the jacket on the left by clicking the circular “meatball” to the right of the layer in the Layers panel. Select the orange Fill item in the Appearance panel, and change the Opacity value in the Control panel to 50%.

STEP 2: Creating a Knockout Group
Problem is, we can see through to the other objects in the Suit group, which gives away the fact that the paths overlap each other. The conventional solution is to apply the Opacity value to the group as a whole instead of the individual paths, but if we did that, we couldn’t affect Fill and Stroke independently. So instead, we need to convert the group to a knockout group. Target the suit group in the Layers panel. Then turn on the Knockout Group checkbox in the Transparency panel. If the checkbox fills with a minus sign instead of a checkmark, click it again to select it for real.

STEP 3: Applying an Opacity Mask
The tops of the jacket paths overlap Sammy’s face, currently represented by a black silhouette. We could use the silhouette path to clip holes in each and every overlapping jacket path, but that would take more effort than it’s worth and potentially leave behind extra stroked edges. Better to cut one large hole in the jacket sublayer using an opacity mask.

When making an opacity mask, white reveals and black conceals. If you wanted to make a white opacity mask, you would select a white path, place it in front of the sublayer you want to clip, Shift-target the sublayer (by Shift-clicking the target icon to the right of jacket in the Layers panel), and choose Make Opacity Mask from the Transparency panel’s flyout menu. Instead, we want to make a black mask, one that conceals the overlapping edges of the jacket, so do this:

• Select the silhouette head outline (head sublayer) and move it above the jacket sublayer in the Layers panel.
• Shift-target the jacket sublayer.
• Choose Make Opacity Mask from the Transparency panel’s flyout menu.
• Turn off the Clip checkbox (also in the Transparency panel).

The silhouette disappears, clipping a hole in the jacket and revealing Sammy’s head in the background.

STEP 4: Opacity Mask Tips and Tricks
Now that you’ve made an opacity mask, here are a few ways to manipulate it. Click on the opacity mask thumbnail in the Transparency panel to make the mask active. Shift-click the mask thumbnail to deactivate or active it. Option-click (PC: Alt-click) the mask thumbnail to view the thumbnail independently of the illustration (below). And finally, click the drawing thumbnail (in our case, the jacket) to return to the illustration.

STEP 5: Blending between Groups
Now for a little meta-tip that has nothing to do with transparency and everything to do with creative expression, flexibility, and all-around coolness. The keys on the piano sublayer are actually a blend. But instead of blending between two paths—to create a custom gradient, for example—I made the keys by blending between two groups of paths. That’s right, Illustrator lets you blend between groups.

Let’s re-create things by turning on the piano layer visibility and releasing the blend object (target the blend sublayer and go to Object>Blend>Release). Notice that each key group comprises three paths: a black key, a white highlight line, and a black line that represents the border between white keys. Select both groups and choose Object>Blend>Make to blend them together. Edit the blend and specify 21 steps (Object>Blend>Blend Options). Twirl down the Blend group and target the path sublayer. Choose the Convert Anchor Point tool (Shift-C) and click-and-drag on the endpoints of the path to create control handles. Then use the Direct Selection tool (A) to drag the control handles to change the speed of the blend and add some perspective.

STEP 6: Editing an Existing Opacity Mask
The bottom edges of Sammy’s jacket and pants are visible through the blue part of the keyboard because its blend mode has been set to Multiply, thus advertising to the world that I haven’t drawn everything. We need to use the keyboard to clip the leg stump away. Select the bottom blue path in the piano sublayer and choose Edit>Copy. Then target the jacket sublayer, click on its opacity mask thumbnail in the Transparency panel, and choose Edit>Paste in Front to paste the blue shape in place in the opacity mask. To make it a proper concealer, fill the shape with black and set its Stroke to None.

STEP 7: Creating a Gradient Opacity Mask
You can combine a gradient with an opacity mask to make a continuous fade. Click the Create New Layer icon in the Layers panel, draw a rectangle that encompasses the entire piano, and fill it with a black-to-white gradient with an Angle of –90°, straight up. While you’re at it, click the gradient slider on top of the gradient bar and enter a Location of around 75%. (Make sure the Stroke is set to None.) Move this new path down the Layers panel so it sits directly in front of the piano sublayer. Target the piano layer, choose the Selection tool (V), and Shift-click the gradient in the document. Then choose Make Opacity Mask from the Transparency panel’s flyout menu, which converts the gradient to a new opacity mask. The keyboard fades from opaque at the top (where the mask is white) to transparent at the bottom (where the mask is black).

STEP 8: The Multiply Blend Mode
Let’s now move from translucency effects to blend modes, which allow you to apply more complex mathematical interactions. Target the bench sublayer (which contains the blue bench), choose the Multiply blend mode from the Transparency panel, and set the Opacity to 50%. Multiply burns the bench into its background, as if the bench and background were printed on separate transparencies and stacked one in front of the other on a light table. In other words, everything gets darker. For another example, turn on the eyes sublayer. Target the makeup paths, apply the Multiply blend mode, and again reduce the Opacity value to 50%.

STEP 9: The Screen Blend Mode
Throughout the Adobe print applications, the opposite of Multiply is Screen. Target the blue eye paths in the eyes sublayer and choose the Screen blend mode from the Transparency panel. Screen treats eyes and background as if they were output to separate slides, placed in two different projectors and shown on the same screen. In other words, it’s great for creating highlights like those in the eyes.

STEP 10: The Color and Luminosity Modes
At this stage in his life, Sammy had no hair. (He has a full head of hair now, you’ll be relieved to know.) So I felt obliged to give him some in Illustrator. Twirl open the hair sublayer and target the hair shapes (which have been combined into a single compound path). Try out a couple of other useful blend modes in the Transparency panel. The Color mode mixes the blues of the hair with the underlying background details. The Luminosity mode mixes the texture of the hair into the flesh colors below.

Both effects are interesting, but we want to blend individual Fill attributes. So undo any playing around and switch to the Appearance panel. Select the blue Fill attribute and change the blend mode to Color. Then select the gradient Fill attribute, set its blend mode to Screen, and reduce the Opacity value to 80% to create the effect pictured here.

STEP 11: Screen and Super-Rich Black
Toward the top of the Layers panel is an object called Gradient. The gradient goes from black at the top to blue way at the bottom. Turn on the big Gradient path and change the blend mode in the Transparency panel to Screen. If you have any familiarity with Screen (from your work in Photoshop, for example), you know that it lightens all colors except black, which drops out. And yet in our case, black results in a significant brightening effect. What gives?

The problem is that we have a plain black, made of 100% K only. Because C, M, and Y are 0%, or white, these inks lighten. To make the black invisible, change the final color in the gradient to a super-rich black, in which all inks (CMYK) are set to 100%. (To do this, click on the black gradient slider in the Gradient panel, choose CMYK from the Color panel’s flyout menu, then drag the CMY sliders to 100%.) Now black is completely neutral, resulting in a blue-to-transparent gradient, as indicated by the highlight in the bottom-left corner of the image below.

STEP 12: Masking an Entire Layer
Now let’s mask away the excess vector garbage that’s hanging outside the artboard. I’ve already drawn a couple of rectangles (without Fill or Stroke) around the boundaries of the artboard and placed it as the first sublayer in the For You! layer. Deselect everything in the illustration (Select>Deselect). Click on the layer name For You! (don’t target the layer) and click the Make/Release Clipping Mask icon at the bottom of the Layers panel. The result appears below.

STEP 13: Becoming a Transparency Detective
The transparency functions in Illustrator are exciting, powerful, even inspirational. But they can be confusing as well, especially if you’re wandering through a piece of artwork created by someone else (or by you a long time ago). For example, consider the contents of the Text Items layer. If you turn on that layer’s visibility and target the Knockout group, you’ll notice that the Appearance panel lists Other Transparency Options. What in the heck is that? To find out, check out the bottom section of the Transparency panel. In this case, the Knockout Group checkbox is turned on.

Twirl open the Knockout sublayer in the Layers panel and you’ll see a black path at the bottom. This is the talk balloon. Given that nothing in the talk balloon looks black, how does the path work? It’s another weak black set to Screen. Set the K value to 50% to lighten the balloon even more.

STEP 14: Flattener Preview, Rasterize in Photoshop
Okay, so it’s fun, beautiful, and weird, but will it print? Given that PostScript doesn’t support transparency, aren’t we flirting with disaster? Not necessarily. First, bear in mind lots of things aren’t supported by PostScript, including gradients, and Illustrator manages to communicate them anyway. Second, you can check out areas of concern using the Flattener Preview panel (Window>Flattener Preview). Click the Refresh button and select All Affected Objects from the Highlight pop-up menu. Everything that’s red needs some kind of special attention (below). Third, if you’re at all concerned that something is going to go wrong, open the AI file in Photoshop (or save it as a TIFF image from Illustrator using File>Export). Set the Resolution value to 1200 ppi if you want super-sharp results that are guaranteed to print.

If there’s a moral to this story, it’s this: Transparency functions in Illustrator are as complex as they are amazing. They’re likewise safe. So long as you’re prepared to export your vector art as a high-resolution image file, you can do anything you want without any worries of PostScript incompatibilities. So play your heart out. Unlike that piano, your illustration is indestructible.

From actions to batch processing and scripting, Photoshop makes automation accessible to moderate and expert users alike. Yet despite automation’s obvious benefits—i.e., you can kick back and let Photoshop do the routine, brain-dead stuff for you—most designers never take advantage of it. Instead, they waste countless hours doing the routine, brain-dead stuff manually because they’re either too busy or too intimidated to plan a more efficient approach.

Don’t fall into that trap. If nothing else, learn how to use the Actions palette. The oldest and easiest form of automation in Photoshop, an action is a recorded sequence of events. Record the action, test it to make sure it works, and it may serve you well for years to come, even from one version of Photoshop to the next. Invest an hour or two now and your future self—sunning yourself on a beach while Photoshop works away like your compliant digital slave—will thank you.

In this column, I lay out the basic approach to recording, testing, and saving an action. In future columns, we’ll put this approach to use and design some mind-bogglingly practical actions of our own. Prepare yourself to join the smug and satisfied ranks of the real-world “actioneers.”

STEP ONE:
Make sure you have an image open to serve as a guinea pig for your action, and choose Window>Actions to bring up the Actions palette. Every action has to reside inside a folder, called a set, so select the set that will house your new action. If this is the first time you’ve made an action, no sense in junking up one of Photoshop’s default sets. Better to create your own by clicking the little folder icon at the bottom of the Actions palette. Name the set as desired and click OK.

STEP TWO:
Click the little page icon at the bottom of the Actions palette to make a new action. Photoshop will ask you to name your new action. Give it a descriptive name that explains the function of the action. You can always change the name later, but might as well give it your best shot for now. Click the Record button to begin recording.

STEP THREE:
Perform the operations that you want to record, in the sequence you want to record them. This generally means choosing a command, entering some settings, and clicking the OK button. But it might also mean switching modes (as when entering or exiting Quick Mask mode) or changing a selection, layer, channel, path, or other specialized object. (Actions are not particularly good at recording manual operations, such as dragging, painting, or editing.) Each successfully recorded operation will appear as a step in the Actions palette.
Incidentally, there’s no rush. The action will play back at the same speed regardless of how long it takes you to record it. The red Begin Recording button at the bottom of the Actions palette doesn’t mean “Hurry!” It’s just Photoshop’s way of being an active listener. Take that phone call, go see that movie. Photoshop is patient.

STEP FOUR: Although the Actions palette is a good and patient listener, it’s not very forgiving of mistakes. You can get away with canceling out of a dialog, but if you undo, the Actions palette ignores you and leaves the previous operation in place. (Back stepping from the History palette is even worse—every change to the history state gets recorded as yet another step in the action!)

So if you’re not sure where you’re going and you want to test out a few steps before you record them and make a mess of your action, take a break by clicking the square Stop Recording button at the bottom of the palette or hitting the Escape key. Think of it as pause. You can always take up where you left off—or at any other step in the action.

STEP FIVE:
After you stop recording, choose File>Save to save the image. Then try out the steps you want to apply and make sure they work out the way you hoped. When you’re ready to resume, choose File>Revert to get the image back to its previous state. Then click the round Begin Recording button at the bottom of the Actions palette to resume recording.

STEP SIX:
Expect to repeat Steps Three through Five several times to get the action right. When you’re completely finished with the action, click the square Stop Recording button a final time.

STEP SEVEN:
Now for the moment of truth. Just because your action worked well for the current image doesn’t mean it’s going to work worth a hill of beans in another image. So it’s very important to test the action by playing it on three or four other images. These images should be different sizes, contain different numbers of layers, and otherwise be, well, different. It’s possible the action will succeed, but it’s more likely that it’ll fail. That’s when you need to troubleshoot the action and edit its steps as needed. (I’ll discuss troubleshooting more in a future column.)

STEP EIGHT:
Actions are savable in sets only. So when you’re satisfied with the action, save the set by clicking on the set name and choosing Save Actions from the Actions palette flyout menu. It doesn’t matter if the set contains just the one action; better to save the set than lose an action in a crash.

All right, so there you have it—the eight steps required to create and save a flexible, practical, problem-free action. In an upcoming issue, we’ll employ this basic approach to create an action that assigns a digital watermark, complete with trade dress, to your copyrighted digital images.

But why am I telling you this? You’re a creative professional, not a programmer. Starting now, you’re both. This tutorial will walk you through the process of creating a simple JavaScript command that deletes all alpha channels from an image, no matter how many there are. Then we’ll install the command into Photoshop and test it on a sample image.

Writing a JavaScript Routine

STEP 1 Find an Image with Alpha Channels
As you may know, an alpha channel is an extra grayscale plate that lets you save a selection or mask along with an image. A single complex mask may require the creation of several alpha channels. Our sample is a real-world masking example from my book Adobe Photoshop CS2 One-on-One. First we see the original image; next we see the masked foreground set against a different background, with wispy hair and translucent flame blended to perfection. On the right, the Channels palette shows close to a dozen alpha channels, each of which represents a step in the masking process.

PHOTO CREDIT: ©ISTOCKPHOTO/ANDRZEJ BURAK

STEP 2 Define Your Problem
Suppose you want to prepare an image for a client. No sense in including the alpha channels, so you delete them. You can select multiple channels, but you can delete only one channel at a time. You can save a copy of an image without alpha channels, but that requires the extra step of opening the original image if you want to work on it. You can record the deletion of a channel as an action, but an action isn’t smart enough to apply only to alpha channels and repeat the deletion as long as alpha channels exist. Solution: JavaScript.

STEP 3 Start the ExtendScript Toolkit Utility
Before you can create a JavaScript file, you need a script-editing program such as ExtendScript Toolkit, included with Photoshop. On the Mac, go to the Finder and press Command-Shift-U to open the Applications:Utilities folder, then open the Adobe Utilities subfolder. On the PC, you may find this utility in C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Utilities. Or locate the program in the Start menu. ExtendScript Toolkit, unlike a plain text-editing program, automatically colors your code so that you can more easily see what you’re doing. And you can try out some code in Photoshop by clicking the Run icon.

STEP 4 Add a Few Introductory Comments
It’s tempting to dive in and start coding, but it’s important to begin with a few introductory comments. Like all JavaScript-savvy applications, Photoshop ignores any line of code that begins with two forward slashes. To ignore multiple lines, start the lines with /* and end them with */. Any ignored code is considered a comment, which ExtendScript Toolkit formats in magenta.

We started our script with the copyright statement, author credits, and description shown below.

// Copyright 2006 Type & Graphics, Inc.
// Deke and Daniel McClelland, authors of this little honey

/*
This script deletes all alpha channels from an image.
*/

STEP 5 Target the Script on Photoshop
Now press Return (PC: Enter) twice, then enter the above lines of code. The two lines that begin // are comments. The others (which you must enter exactly as written) switch the operating system’s attention to Photoshop and make Photoshop the active application, in that order. While not absolutely necessary, this code ensures that the script works even when called from another program.

// enable double-clicking from the Macintosh Finder or the Windows Explorer
#target photoshop

// in case we double clicked the file
app.bringToFront();

STEP 6 Open the JavaScript Reference Guide
Now we need to enter the code that deletes the alpha channels. But how do we know what that is? By consulting the dense, sometimes infuriating, but ultimately essential JavaScript Reference Guide, a 335-page PDF document that ships with Photoshop.

Locate the folder on your hard disk that contains the Photoshop application. Then open the subfolder called Scripting Guide and double-click JavaScript Reference Guide.pdf to open it in Adobe Reader, Acrobat, or Preview on the Mac. Page 1 bears the title JavaScript Scripting Reference.

STEP 7 Check Out the Channels Class
Go to the Bookmarks panel (or the Drawer in Preview) and expand the third heading, JavaScript Object Reference, to reveal the main scripting elements, known as classes. We want to modify the channels in an image, so scroll down to the bookmarks called Channel (singular) and Channels (plural). One of these is what we want.

Click on the Channel class. Notice the Methods, which are the things we can do to the channels. The Channel class has delete, for deleting a single channel. The Channels class has removeAll, for deleting all channels. That’s the one we want.

STEP 8 Set a Variable for the Open Image
Return to ExtendScript Toolkit. Add a couple of Return characters, then enter a new line of code as shown above. This line creates a variable called theImage that stands in for the frontmost open image (activeDocument) in Photoshop (app). While variables are not essential to working in JavaScript, they help to simplify the code and make it easier to understand.

Note that the variable is not a comment; it’s a line of code, so accuracy is imperative! (Don’t worry about the formatting; ExtendScript Toolkit automatically makes the word var bold.)

var theImage = app.activeDocument;

STEP 9 Enter the Code That Deletes the Channels
Press Return (PC: Enter) to advance to the next line of code and enter the above. Again, for this code to work, you must enter it exactly as written. The code tells Photoshop to turn its attention to the frontmost open image, look at the file’s channels, and delete all channels that aren’t absolutely necessary to render the composite color image. This means all alpha and spot-color channels, if any exist.

theImage.channels.removeAll();

STEP 10 Play the Script from ExtendScript Toolkit
Now it’s time to play the script and make sure it works. Confirm that you have an image open in Photoshop that contains lots of alpha channels. Bring up the Channels palette to track the script’s progress. Return to the ExtendScript Toolkit utility and click the Run icon (sideways triangle) at the top of the window. This plays the script in Photoshop.

If necessary, switch to Photoshop. (ExtendScript Toolkit doesn’t always do this automatically.) Then watch as Photoshop deletes each and every alpha channel.

If something goes wrong, check your code for accuracy and try again.

STEP 11 Save the JavaScript File
Inside ExtendScript Toolkit, choose File>Save As and name the script Delete All Alphas.jsx. The JSX extension associates the file with Photoshop and the other Creative Suite applications. (The JavaScript extension is also compatible, but it will most likely associate the file with another application.) Assuming the script is functioning properly, choose File>Close to close the script and prevent further, potentially harmful modifications.

Install JavaScript Command in Photoshop

STEP 1 Install the Script into Photoshop CS2
You can install a JavaScript file as a command in the File>Scripts submenu in Photoshop. To do so, locate the folder on your hard disk that contains the Photoshop application. Then open the Presets folder and open the Scripts subfolder.

Now locate the folder that contains the Delete All Alphas.jsx file that you saved in the previous step. Copy the JavaScript file to the Presets:Scripts subfolder.

STEP 2 Restart Photoshop
Photoshop loads new scripts in the Presets:Scripts folder each time you launch the program, so a restart is needed. Choose Photoshop>Quit Photoshop (PC: File>Exit). Don’t bother saving the changes to the file that formerly contained the alpha channels; you’ll need all those alpha channels in just a moment. Now start up Photoshop and open the image that contains the slew of alpha channels. Our restored image is shown here.

STEP 3 Play the JavaScript Command
Go to the File>Scripts submenu and notice the appearance of a new command, Delete All Alphas. Make sure the Channels palette is visible, then choose the Delete All Alphas command. Photoshop will delete all non-color channels.

Bear in mind, this tiny 15-line script represents the most basic foray into the world of scripting in Photoshop CS2. For more information, take a look at the contents of the Scripting Guide folder that ships with Photoshop.