Something Interactive

Adobe Photoshop CS3 is a graphics designer’s Swiss-Army knife, bundled with an amazing set of tools like Camera Raw, Photomerge, Vanishing Point, Liquify,… the list goes on.
I’ve dreamed of a couple tools that might help me with my image resizing too.

Well by coincidence, one of my dreams has been put into application reality - it’s called Seam-Carving Content Aware Image Resizing.

Also known as Media Retargeting, rather than me use words to explain what it means, these geniuses have put it into a nice video for us to learn all about this new image processing technique.

There are two online examples that allow the public to upload and retarget their photos:

I assume that they heavily use Adobe Flash’s latest bitmap API to do the processing on the fly.
The concept of the programming is pretty straight forward, but the application is still computationally-intense.

Seeing as how it has already been built with Adobe Flash, and since it’s quite slow, I figure it’s only a matter of time before Adobe incorporates an offline adaptation into Photoshop’s next version toolset where they can really harness the appropriate computing power to make the process a bit more “real-time”.

And look at that, Adobe CS3 is less than a year out and I’m already looking forward to CS4.

I’ve come to use this nifty little keyboard shortcut combination for Reverse Layers within Adobe Photoshop CS or greater. And, it’s a safe key-combination to use from the default set.

1. Open up your Keyboard Shortcuts Panel.
2. Navigate to the Layer menu.
3. Further down to the Arrange submenu
4. Further-still down to the Reverse option
5. Bind the key-combination (MAC:) COMMAND+SHIFT+r (PC:) CTRL+SHIFT+r to this option

Now select a group of layers in your layers palette. Hit your new keyboard shortcut, and voila! Layers reversed.

When I work in Photoshop I usually have my screen mode set full screen, so that I can use my screen to it’s maximum potential and edit artwork that bleeds off the edges of the document area.

I recently turned off my rulers (PC: CTRL+r MAC: Command+r) for even further maximum viewing area, and noticed that grabbing the page and moving it around was much smoother!

I think the rendering of the measurement numbers and the scaling marks on the rulers in photoshop take some GPU or CPU rendering power away. Whenever I have the rulers on, it just seems to make the redraw of the entire window sluggish and choppy when I manipulate the document.

I’m leaving rulers off from now on.