While generating the initial image sequence for a knob can be a lot of fun, concatenating them into a vertical knob image isn’t something I look forward to. I’m Mac-based and couldn’t find a decent tool for doing this. As it’s a bit tedious and overly manual to do with actions in Photoshop I’ve written a script called StackSpreader that automates the process dynamically. I know there are a lot people doing similar skinning work for Reaktor and Max etc., and this has uses beyond knobs, so I thought I’d share it.

You can grab it here:
http://nkurence.com/dev/tools/StackSpreader.jsx.zip

First load your image sequence into a stack with Scripts/Load Files Into Stack…
Then execute StackSpreader.
That’s it.

StackSpreader will prompt you for a canvas expansion direction, Top, Bottom, Left, Right.. if you’re making knobs, progress bars etc., you want Bottom. I think every knob stack I’ve ever seen goes the same direction but I figured the script would be more useful if you could build in any direction, so now it can. The script executes dynamically based on the initial canvas size (for iteration distance) and layer count (for iteration repeats).

If you want to streamline things further you can create a new action in the Actions palette that captures both steps:
1. create a new action
2. hit the corner menu and select ‘Insert Menu Item’; then select Scripts/Load Files Into Stack…
3. hit the corner menu and select ‘Insert Menu Item’; then select Scripts/StackSpreader (assuming you’ve copied StackSpreader.jsx into your Photoshop/Preset/Scripts directory)
Then you can run this one action to build the stack and offsets it one swoop.

I commented out the script so if you want to customize it or poke about its guts, feel free.

cheers,
n