Photoshop

While working on the next release of Sphericle (which is going to be awesome), I've had to create new map icons for the Search screen in the app. I want these icons to have the same style of shadow as the Google Map pins do on the iPhone. So, after some experimentation, I found a pretty easy and accurate way to do that. Here's what we're starting with:

On the left, you can see the typical pin. On the right is an icon I'm working on, showing a player's profile picture. This is the icon we'll make a shadow for.

Duplicate and Merge Your Shadowed Object

First off, you want to create a flat copy of whatever you're making a shadow for. In this example, the icon is actually made up of several layers grouped together, so I select the Group, then "Duplicate Group", then "Merge Group". read more »

A reader asked if there was a way to apply the Photoshop Thumbnail script I wrote to all open documents, so I figured I'd post it up here for everyone to see. read more »

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post called Conditional Image Resizing with Photoshop and JavaScript that illustrated how to write a script to perform quick photo cleanup and resizing within a bounded area. Today I want to talk about a similar technique for generating thumbnail images. The fundamentals are the same, but the goal is slightly different. read more »

Often I find myself having to do a lot of bulk image processing when I'm working on websites: resizing a bunch of pictures to a certain width or height, color adjustments, and sharpening, usually. It can be the most mind-numbing part of my work, and I'm always looking for ways to avoid that.

In Photoshop, you can use actions to help you automate a lot of repetitive work. However, the shortcoming I've found with actions is their lack of conditional behavior. For example, let's say I have a big batch of images, some portrait-oriented (taller than they are wide) and some landscape-oriented (vice versa), and I want to resize each of them to fit within a 500 x 500 pixel square. If the image is portrait-oriented, then I need to resize proportionally, setting the height to 500 pixels. If it's landscape-oriented, then I should resize proportionally with a 500 pixel width, instead of height. I've never found a good way to do this with a single action. But where actions fail, JavaScript comes to the rescue. read more »