Add option to export also the Mask Box (the one on the black background)

[Acan69]

Hi, thanks for your very helpful work. I've been using it for a couple of days now, and it's literally changed my life in my job as a graphic designer for an Italian manga publishing house. I wanted to ask if it were possible to add an additional option during export to export the Mask Box (the first one, the one with the white rectangles on a black background, so to speak) in addition to the Final Mask (_mask) and the clean file (_clean).
For the type of work I do later in InDesign, it would be a further invaluable time saver.
Sorry for the translation, and thanks again.
Andrea

[VoxelCubes]

Hi, that's awesome to hear! Glad it's working for you and saving time.

If you are comfortable with a bit of scripting, you could hook that up either by using the CLI and pulling the box mask files out of the cache, or if you're using the GUI, you can set up a post run script. Those are a bit of a power-user feature, not sure you're aware of them.

I suppose you're on windows, because of adobe, yes?
Do you have python installed on that machine, such that it can be run from a terminal? Or if not that, powershell should work?

You could write whatever script you want to pull the files you want out of the cache, and place them next to the outputs (or let AI write the script haha). The post-run actions provide everything you need to make it easy.
If you want, I can write that for you too, preferably in python.

[Acan69]

Hi, thanks for the reply! So, I'm on macOS Tahoe, I installed Python 3.14.6 directly from the website (without downloading the Command Line Tools) and then installed PCleaner-Gui (2.11.10) in an environment (env) in my working folder in /Downloads.
Of course, if you could write this feature for me in Python, I'd be very grateful. Thanks!

[VoxelCubes]

All right, I got it working! You can find the post action python script in the new top level folder called post-action examples. Read the few instructions inside there carefully and then it'll just work. I also made a few changes to allow for this to work a lot more robustly, so that processing multiple folders of images with identical file names among them won't break the script. That's why you'll need to update to the new version, 2.11.11.
It also fixes the option to remember the last post action, so you don't need to keep selecting this for all of your cleaning batches.

You can use that example post action to make other workflows based on it. If you aren't too familiar with python, chatgpt can probably get the script to do whatever else you need too.

I don't think that having box masks is very useful for most people, so I can't justify putting it into panel cleaner directly, but I hope this works for you!

[Acan69]

Thanks so much, I installed 2.11.11 and it works great! I'll try to understand your ExportBoxMask.py better later, but for now I have what I need.

Thanks again!

Andrea

[VoxelCubes]

You're welcome, glad it works.