The Photoshop Productivity Series: Automating Photoshop

Flatten All Masks

I can honestly say I’ve never used the Flatten All Masks script (File > Scripts), nor am I likely to use it. Very simply, I am a big—huge—proponent of working nondestructively as I describe in book three of this series. I always want to preserve as much editability as I can, and that means retaining all masks. This script does the exact opposite: it flattens all masks, turning all layers with a mask into layers that only contains the pixels shown by the mask. Frankly, the thought of folks flattening all the masks in their documents frightens me—and also makes me ask, “Why would you want to do that?” As with many things in Photoshop, Adobe includes functions for a wide variety of workflows. Personally, I can’t think of too many ...