PS-7 can this be done?

[tangles]

I have an image that's 900 pixels wide. I want to slice it up into 5-pixel strips and put each strip on its own layer.

I know how to do this with the selection tool, one at a time. This is, to say the least, um, teeeee-dious.

Does anyone know how to automate this?

Thanks for your help.

[OuTpaTienT]

Well, the way I'd do it may still be a little tedious but it's not too bad. I'd make an action that would cut the selection to a new layer, then select everything on that layer (to get your marquee back), then target the original layer, and then move that marquee over 5 pixels. Every time you press the button to run that action it'll cut another layer.

Here's how to do that:

- Set your Rulers to use pixels as the unit of measurement.

- Choose your rectangular Marquee Tool and set it at a fixed size of 5 pixels wide and n pixels high (whatever the height of your image is).

- Place the Marquee at the left edge of the image.

- Open the Actions palette and from the fly out menu choose New Action, give it a name and hit "record".

- Go to Photoshop's drop down menus and choose Layer / New / Layer via Cut

- Now hold down CTRL and click on the thumbnail of that new layer in the Layers palette to reset your Marquee selection.

- Then click on the original layer to re-target it.

- Now hit the right-arrow key 5 times.

- Go to the Actions palette and Stop the recording.

Now every time you run that Action it'll cut the selection to a new layer, reselect and move the selection right 5 pixels. If you then put the Action palette in "button mode" you can simply press the button for this action repeatedly and watch it cut up your image into layers.

(If it were a much larger image, like many thousand pixels wide, then I'd run an outside macro program to have it press the action button repeatedly for me.)

[tangles]

This works great! (Now I just have to figure out exactly what it's doing).
Btw, I used "duplicate" in the Actions Palette Menu so now the action performs the commands 10 times instead of one. Thank you!

[tangles]

I just tried putting a "play action..." command inside another action. Now with one action I can repeat the operation 100 times. Nice! Thanks again for your help.

[OuTpaTienT]

Holy crap. Really? I didn't know you could do that. LOL.

I can't believe after nearly 15 years I'm still learning stuff about Photoshop!