how to add a cross for printing in Contact Sheet II

Question

I use this feature a lot in photoshop to have print ready pdfs out of hunders of .psd files. which reduces the file size and time efficient.

But the printing people complain that they don't have a cross so the laser cutter guy can't cut them.

Is there a way to do it? please notice even with contact sheet ii, there are lots of .pdfs to be printed which are basicaly duplex print ready scaled images in a white plain.

thank you much appreciated

Answer 1

The contact sheet functionality is not the correct way to output press ready PDF's I'm afraid.

The "cross marks" you refer to are actually called "bleed" and "crop" lines, and they are not available as options in The Contact Sheet module - barring some kind of crazy and difficult "hack".

I suggest you look into the InDesign package which caters for this workflow perfectly, and offers crop and bleed options very easily on export.

Answer 2

This could be done with an action in Photoshop assuming all the photos and contact sheets are created exactly the same, with the same settings, and always in the same position. It's perhaps a bit of a pain to set up, but once you have done it, you can reuse the action over and over again.

1. Make just one contact sheet. You'll use this to set up your crop marks.

2. Increase the canvas size of the contact sheet to give you enough room to place the crop marks. Take a note of the size.

3. Use guides to help you place the crop marks.

4. Create a new layer, and create all your crop marks by drawing them with the pencil tool set to 1 pixel. Tip: To draw straight lines with the pencil tool, click once, then hold down Shift as you click again. This creates a straight line between both clicked points.

5. When you have finished, press CTRL+A (select all) - [Command+A on Mac]. And apply a 2 pixel stroke to the entire page selection, using Edit > Stroke

6. Delete all the other layers, including the photos, so you are left with just the crop marks layer. Save this file as CropMarks.psd somewhere you can find it again easily.

7. Close the document.

8. Now create a single contact sheet again.

9. Open the Actions panel, and begin recording an new action. Give the new action a name such as "Add Cropmarks".

10. Change the canvas size as before (to the same dimensions as you noted down before).

11. Open the CropMarks PSD.

12. Press CTRL+A to select all, then CTRL+C to copy. [on Macs use Command instead of CTRL]

13. Close the CropMarks PSD file without saving

14. Press CTRL+V to paste. [on Macs use Command instead of CTRL]

15. Stop the action recording.

16. Now close the document without saving.

That completes the crop marks action. Now when you need to create contact sheets in future all you need to do is follow the next two steps.

1. Run your Contact Sheet script to generate all your contact sheets for all your images. Obviously you need to use all the same settings as before.

2. When it has finished, select each contact sheet in turn and apply the Action you just made. Then save them all as PDF or whatever format you want.