adobe-manual

Adobe MCP — automating Illustrator / Photoshop

A field manual for Illustrator (illustrator-mcp-server) + Photoshop (photoshop-mcp): environment prerequisites (elevation alignment), tool capability boundaries, coordinate systems, the JSX scripting channel, and batch image-swap / layout / color-grading workflows.

Four iron rules (memorize first)

1. Elevation alignment (violated = every MCP tool times out with -32001): the server (node) and the Illustrator/Photoshop process must run at the same elevation (admin-vs-admin, user-vs-user). If Adobe is already running, "Run as administrator" merely focuses the old instance — you must fully exit first, then relaunch.

2. Batch jobs go through COM DoJavaScript (far faster than --run, and the return value is printable for verification):

   $ai = New-Object -ComObject Illustrator.Application   # PS: Photoshop.Application
   $jsx = [System.IO.File]::ReadAllText('C:\path\script.jsx', [System.Text.Encoding]::UTF8)
   $result = $ai.DoJavaScript($jsx, @(), 1)              # 1 = execute synchronously
   

3. Illustrator's two coordinate systems: artboard-web (origin at the artboard's top-left, Y down; used by place_image / modify_object) vs document (origin at the artboard's bottom-left, Y up; used by the bounds returned from get_layers etc.); conversion artboard_y = artboard_height − document_y(top). The sturdiest batch-swap recipe = reuse the old image's left/top/width/height and do no coordinate conversion at all.

4. Known MCP defects and their bypasses: sublayer objects notFound (move to a top layer or use JSX); RGB modify falsely reports success (use the gray format); Photoshop open_document is broken (JSX app.open).

Content map

Domain	File	Content
Illustrator	references/illustrator-guide.md	Environment prerequisites / registry repair, MCP capability boundaries, coordinate systems, the JSX channel with templates, human-AI diff collaboration, the one-shot contour-panel swap method, batch layout and experimental phase-diagram composition in the field, a 144-image array swap in the field (the move-before-embed canonical order), a 72-image embed in the field (three traps and the mirror-verdict method), quick-troubleshooting table
Photoshop	references/photoshop-guide.md	The COM channel, the layer.kind trap, cross-document copying, the LUT reverse-engineering method for unreadable adjustment parameters, quick-troubleshooting table
Sample code	scripts/embed_phase_diagram.jsx	The complete template for converting linked images to embedded wholesale (v8, 72/72 in the field): pure-data snapshots, re-read-at-the-tail, flip restoration, z-order marker restoration, ungrouping, a final geometry-correction phase, double verification; the target path arrives via arguments

Scope boundaries

• matplotlib figure generation (before anything enters Illustrator): the academic-plotting skill;
• ParaView contour rendering: the paraview-pitfalls skill (its pipeline's tail end feeds this skill's composition);
• PowerShell encoding/BOM pitfalls when driving Adobe: see the corresponding sections inside references/.