When you’re a hobbiest programmer, every problem looks like it can be solved with a little scripting. This Holiday season I was working on a for-print art project and I needed some paint splatter for texture. Splattering paint is a great way to get some organic texture into a piece of art, but it’s messy and requires a lot of room. So I decided to try writing a quick script to see if I could accurately simulate it.

The end result is this little web app I wrote. It’s got a little bit of GUI to make it easy to adjust the amount of splatter you need. The end result is an image that you can use in Photoshop.

Here’s a brief rundown of how it works:

+ The canvas is made up of “passes” of paint splatter. You can Add and delete as many passes as you want.
+ Each pass has it’s own set of settings. you click on a pass on the left, then you can change the settings for that pass.
+ double-headed sliders set minimums and maximums for settings.
+ As you change settings, you’ll see a realtime preview of just that pass on the right.
+ when you stop dragging a slider, the big canvas will re-splatter with your new settings.
+ To get the image into Photoshop, you click on the “Copy to clipboard” button or “copy inverted”, which reverses it for better channel creation.
+ You can tweak with a small sized canvas, then when you got it the way you want, make the canvas bigger.
+ There’s no way to save settings yet.

you may need to install the latest Shockwave plug-in to make it work. Enjoy

I have ranted in various places about how disappointed I am with Photoshop’s current trend of adding auto-layer-selection to tools. I’ll give you the micro-version of the rant:

One of Photoshop’s most power features is its layer palette panel. You pick the layer you want, and then work on it with the tools, not worrying about what’s in front of it or behind it. In more recent versions of Photoshop some tools have started to automatically choose a layer for you when you click in the document. Some tools have this as an option, like the Move tool, but others are not optional, like the Text tool and the Vector shape selection tools. The problem is that these tools break the model of “pick then layer, then work on it in place”. I have to watch very closely every move I make with the Vector layer tools and Text tool or risk accidentally selecting another one.

That’s my rant in a nutshell. Recently I’ve started to believe that Adobe’s new love affair with auto-layer-selecting tools is actually a suboptimal cure for a root problem: Photoshop’s power has outpaced its generalized layer selection tools. Read the rest of this entry

Adobe released a beta of Photoshop CS3 in the labs today.

I don’t have much comments on it yet.

I saw the “Design your own Nightmare Before Christmas character” contest listed on the The Disney Blog and decided to enter it because I enjoy creative contests where they just don’t pick a winner at random. I thought the video from Tim Burton would be a pretty cool prize.

I spent about 2 hours designing a headless character, but I was wondered if it invoked Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow movie more than Nightmare before Christmas, so I scrapped it. In thinking about what would be more in spirit with the movie, I came up with the idea of playing off of the 3d aspect of the re-release. Soon I had the idea to combine two one-eye’d heads onto a single body. Read the rest of this entry

The wonderful blog IronicSans interviews Seetharaman Narayanan of Photoshop splashscreen fame. I love interviews of unfamous people behind famous things, like The Sneeze’s interview with the FedEx logo designer.

First off, although I love them, I have some issues Photoshop’s Vector tools.. But I thought I’d share this little trick I use with snapping vector shapes to guides.

The Problem

When moving stuff around with the Path Selection Tool, shapes only want to snap to guide lines via their points. This can cause the occasional problem when a shape’s curve defines one of it’s edges. Take this rounded triangle for example:

Read the rest of this entry

This odd little Photoshop trick that I’ve used for a long time just came up the other day while I was working on my new game, and I thought I’d blog about it. It uses an obscure side-effect of floating selections to make filling in the gaps of semi-translucent images a bit easier and without a lot of steps. See this broken button here?

The trick I’m about to demonstrate will let me fill in gap in this button without copying, without pasting, without creating a layer, without using the clear command or delete key, and without any precise measurements, and hopefully without me using any more italics. Read the rest of this entry

A few months ago I visited the San Francisco Airport’s in-lobby art exhibit on Polynesian Pop. The display was fantastic -- a lot of great collectables and ephemera from both the midcentury and the current Tiki revival. Humuhumu, her Mom (who was travelling that day) and I browsed the exhibit for quite some time. Taking it all in, something caught my eye, and it wasn’t any of the pieces in the exhibit, but what was behind them. The back of the display case was lined with a huge print of faux Hawaiian patterns. Read the rest of this entry

I’ve done a bit more research on the Photoshop bug I mentioned in an older post, and I’m now sharing it here.

For many versions of Photoshop for Windows, pressing ALT+E,A,V and ALT+E,A,H have been the only way to do keyboard shortcuts for Edit > Transform > Vertical and Horizontal flip. I learned these keystrokes 10 years ago and have been using them ever since. I don’t even think about it when I trigger them.

When CS2 was released a new feature was added to the Edit menu called Adobe PDF Presets, and some wisenheimer at Adobe decided that it needed a shortcut and assigned ‘A’ to it.

This broke the Transform menu shortcuts. Read the rest of this entry

I’ve owned Photoshop CS2 since it was first available, but I’ve only used it about a dozen times becuase it was too slow. I had emailed Adobe about it but never got a straight answer. It’s been about a year.

But today I found out that Adobe has just released a dot-release for Photoshop CS2. I’ve not installed CS2 yet, but it sounds promising. Check out John Nack’s blog for the details:

John Nack -- Photoshop CS2 update 9.0.1 now available