Photoshop COM

jbrandt

I have not read anywhere about a Photoshop COM module, and I tried whipping one out the other day and I was fairly disappointed.

$ps = new COM ('Photoshop.Application');
$ps->Quit ();

That worked perfectly and loaded the application and then quit (I could see it in the processes dialog), but anytime I tried a:

$ps->Open ('pic.jpg');

it spit out an error that looked like this:

Fatal error: Uncaught exception 'com_exception' with message '<b>Source:</b> Adobe Photoshop<br/><b>Description:</b> General Photoshop error occurred. - <no additional information available>' in C:\home\jbrandt\pic.php:5 Stack trace: #0 C:\home\jbrandt\pic.php(5): com->Open('c:/home/jbrandt...') #1 {main} thrown in C:\home\jbrandt\pic.php on line 5

I suspect that the reason could be there is no support for Photoshop in PHP, but then why would it properly load and close the module?

Thanks in advance,
Jared

Weedpacket

jbrandt wrote:
I suspect that the reason could be there is no support for Photoshop in PHP

Irrelevant: PHP has support for COM and the question is what sort of support Photoshop has for COM. Like error message says, the error message came from Photoshop.

I don't know anything about Photoshop's API.

jbrandt

To clarify for anything else... I have written Visual Basic programs using the Photoshop API and they worked fine... so I figured there must be something wrong with my code. But you say that it should work? Back to the drawing board, methinks!

Thanks,
Jared

MarkR

My guess would be that it expects a full absolute path - never rely on processes' current working directory being where you expect.

On a side note, Photoshop is not designed to be used in a non-interactive context, hence its COM API(s) will probably break if you use them in anger in production (NOTE: I don't know this 100% but this is true of many other apps include MSOffice).

Mark

scrupul0us

http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/photoshop/sdk/index_scripting.html

jbrandt

I actually retyped the code in my message.. I was using an absolute path in the Open method.

Would it be reasonable to assume, then, that Photoshop is incompatible with PHP? On the Adobe website there are only the manuals for JavaScript and VBScript, and they don't work when I try them in PHP.

Thanks,
Jared