Can I use Photoshop to integrate two bitmap sequences?

Factual Questions
1

I have an application where I would like to use information from numbered bitmap files to modify like-numbered files in another sequence.

To elaborate, suppose I have two bitmap sequences, one starting with BITMAPA000001.BMP and the other one starting with BITMAPB000001.BMP. I’d want to replace one of the colour channels in each file in sequence BITMAPA with one of the colour channels in the correspondingly numbered file in sequence BITMAPB, and save to a third sequence.

I have spent plenty of time running actions on bitmap sequences, but is it possible to use bitmap sequences this way with Photoshop?

Anticipating a natural question, I would prefer to use Photoshop w/ a GUI for this because in addition to merely recombining the colour channels I would like to apply some additional effects.

If it comes to it I can probably just use scripts & imagemagick to kind of do what I want, but being able to fuse sequences in Photoshop would be closer to what I actually want to do.

(Was hoping that .act files might be plain text so I could hack what I want out in a text editor, but no such luck.)

2

I’m a graphic designer and use Photoshop actions a lot, but AFAIK they aren’t robust enough to handle this kind of stuff. Your only hope might be that there’s a plugin out there to do what you want.

3

Are you on the Mac? Ypu could control Photoshop with an Applescript program, issuing commands to extract and replace the colour channels. I believe someting similar can theoretically be done on Windows with Windows Scripting, but I don’t know whether Windows Photoshop exploses that kind of programmability.

Edit: I believe both Windows and Mac Photoshop can be scripted in Javascript.