Posts in Category "samples"

Creative Cloud Exclusive and Free! Flypaper Select – High Resolution Textures Pack

Posted on February 26, 2013 by ferman | Comments (4)

Flypaper SelectHot on the heels of the Adobe Paper Texture Panel Pro release I am delighted to announce FlyPaper Select. Flypaper Select is an exclusive collection of 24 high quality and unique textures which were especially chosen for their all round versatility from Flypaper’s eight texture packs. All of Flypaper’s Texture packs will soon be available on Adobe Exchange, several already are, just search for ‘flypaper’ from the Adobe Exchange Panel.

The Adobe Paper Texture Panel Pro and Flypaper Select are complementary products. The Adobe Paper Textures panel and the Pro version of the panel use low resolution Flypaper Textures to generate their effects. The Flypaper Select pack has high resolution (300 dpi) JPEG files that can be used with lots of Adobe apps and have all sorts of uses including photography, artwork, graphics projects, website design, digital, video and not forgetting old school film projects, book design, scrapbooking, illustration and collage. Flypaper texture uses are endless!

How do you get it?

If you are a Creative Cloud paid member then just search for ‘flypaper’ in the Adobe Exchange panel from within the CS6 versions of Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, InCopy, Fireworks, Flash Pro, Premiere Pro or Dreamweaver.

You’ll find the panel in Window > Extensions > Adobe Exchange.

Don’t have the Adobe Exchange Panel? You can download it free. If you’re not already a Creative Cloud paid member you can learn more.

Hurry!

I’d like to thank the team at Flypaper Textures for providing this pack exclusively to Creative Cloud subscribers but get it quickly as it may not stay exclusive or free forever!

Creative Cloud paid member free and exclusive products are our little way of saying thanks to our Creative Cloud subscribers. Please help show your appreciation of these free donations by simply rating after your download. If you are not a Creative Cloud subscriber yet but have CS6, virtually all the products available do not require paid membership, check out the panel to see what’s available.

 

Become a producer yourself!

Becoming a producer for Adobe Exchange is free and easy. Just sign in/sign up here with your Adobe ID. We have lots of different tools and resources to help you create and package products. If you have simple creative files then you just need to use Adobe Exchange Packager, there’s even an embedded video to show you how to use it. Packager will sign and package your products and then you can submit them to the Adobe Exchange Producer Portal. Adobe will review and test your product and then it will be released. As a producer you can even privately share products with other people, ideal for Education, Enterprise, collaborative working and much more. Adobe Exchange is designed to enrich your experience with Adobe apps, whether that’s with a plug-in, an extension, an InDesign template, a Photoshop file or anything else that is related to our Adobe creative products. I can’t wait to see what our rapidly growing number of producers come up with.

Keep up to date with all the latest developments on Adobe Exchange on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.

Jonathan Ferman | Product Manager

Discover the hidden powers of HTML inside Photoshop Panels

Posted on November 26, 2012 by ferman | Comments (4)

Adobe Configurator 3 makes it easy to create custom panels for Photoshop and Illustrator. What you might not know is just how much you can do with HTML inside a Photoshop panel, not just look at a Web page but run powerful scripts and capaibilities. If you are programmer, web developer or just want to see what’s possible this panel is for you. The HTML Sample Panel is available exclusively from Adobe Exchange and you can modify it to you heart’s content with Configurator 3 as it is a sample file you can download.

We look forward to seeing what you come up with and seeing your panels on Adobe Exchange.

Jonathan Ferman | Product Manager

Working with Layers

Posted on February 24, 2011 by Olav Kvern | Comments (1)

Layers, in graphic arts programs, give you a way of organizing objects in your documents and controlling their front-to-back stacking order. Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop all have layers, and share most basic layer features: you can create, move, hide, and show layers, and you can assign objects to layers. Illustrator and Photoshop have the ability to create layers within layers—“layer sets” or “layer groups.”

As is usual, the scripting model differs among the applications, so I’ll provide a set of wrapper functions that will take the same parameters, regardless of the host application. I’ll put all of the application-specific details inside these functions. I’ll make the functions work for Photoshop layer groups and Illustrator sub-layers, as well as for InDesign’s simpler layers. I don’t want to rebuild each application’s Layers panels, so I’ll provide simple buttons for putting the layer functions through their paces. (It seems to me unlikely that you’ll want to re-create the Layers panel, and more likely that you’ll want to add/assign/move layers without displaying a user interface at all. If I’m dead wrong, please let me know!)

This example is even more basic than the previous one—but I found a number of points that might trip up developers trying to work with layers in their extensions.

You can find the example project here:

layers
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More Basics: Importing and Exporting Files

Posted on February 10, 2011 by Olav Kvern | Comments (3)

One of my co-workers (let’s call him “Zak”) recently referred to this series of blog postings as “an expanded Hello World.” Zak wasn’t being critical; he thinks this is a good thing, and I agree. The point is to get developers past the “what do I do now?” hump—the one that follows immediately after you’ve set up your development environment and worked through your first (usually trivial) tutorial example extension.

What I’m trying to do is make sure that new developers don’t get stuck because of some application-specific peculiarity of one of the Creative Suite applications. I know that this can happen, because it’s happened to me. Often.

In this post, we’ll turn back to the “Big Three” applications of the Creative Suite: Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop. All three applications can import, or “place” documents, and can export or save files in a wide variety of file formats. Each program has an idiosyncratic way of doing this basic task, so I’ll create a generic wrapper function and encapsulate (hide) all of the application-specific details.

This post follows in the footsteps of earlier posts, notably ”Drawing Paths,” ”Entering and Formatting Text,” and ”Watching the Detections,” and continues to build our basic Creative Suite SDK construction kit.

You can find the project for this example here:
importexport
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Formatting Text Ranges in Photoshop

Posted on January 31, 2011 by Olav Kvern | Comments (9)

In response to an earlier post, “Entering and Formatting Text” (here) a couple of folks asked if there was a way to apply formatting to ranges of text in a Photoshop text layer. It’s certainly not obvious from the Photoshop scripting object model how one would go about doing this—in fact, I don’t think it’s possible, and said so in my response to the comments.

This exchange got me thinking. So it’s impossible—how do you do it? I knew that Photoshop has another way of scripting (in addition to the object model), the Action Manager. I made a mental note to pursue this course, and promptly got distracted by other work.

In the comments section of the earlier post, Jeremy Knudsen kindly posted a pointer to an exchange from the (excellent) PS-Scripts forum, in which (excellent) Photoshop scripter xbytor described a way to work with text ranges in Photoshop. xbytor’s (excellent) xtools Photoshop scripting package for ExtendScript looked like it might solve the problem. I considered asking xbytor for permission to port the package to ActionScript, but decided to try solving the problem myself. There’s a lot of code in the xTools package, and I was looking for a lighter-weight solution.

This led me back to Photoshop, the Action Manager, and the Script Listener plug-in.

You can find the example project here.

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Putting It All Together: Path Effects

Posted on January 24, 2011 by Olav Kvern | Comments (3)

In these blog posts, I’m trying to create a series of “building blocks” that CS SDK users can put together to make CS Extensions. Need to draw things with your CS Extension? You can pull drawing routines from the “Drawing Paths: The Basics” post. Want to have your CS Extension respond to document open/close events? Grab the DocumentWatcher class from the “Watching the Detections” post.

At the same time, I’m thinking that some CS SDK users are coming to the Creative Suite without deep knowledge of at least some of the applications. A developer who has spent years working with Flash might not know (or want to know) the finer details of drawing paths in Illustrator, or setting type in InDesign.

My goal is to make it possible for these developers to get things done in Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop relatively quickly, without having to learn the document object model of each application (each one different). To that end, I’ve provided functions that encapsulate some of the complexity inside applications-specific functions.

Sadly, for this post, we’ll have to leave Photoshop behind, as that application doesn’t really provide a way to tell if a path is selected. (Or, I should say, it doesn’t provide an obvious way—I’m still looking.)

To see how this might work for you, let’s put together a new CS Extension using parts and pieces from my earlier blog posts. We’ll create an extension that applies various effects to the paths of page items selected in the host application, and we’ll get most of the code from the Drawing and DocumentWatcher projects.

This project also gives me a chance to make a point about Creative Suite Extensions in general: I think that we developers often think only in terms of productivity tools—writing XMP metadata or setting up defaults for a workgroup, that sort of thing. We tend to forget that automation can be used to add creative tools and new artistic effects.

The project for this example is here:

PathEffects
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Watching the Detections

Posted on December 15, 2010 by Olav Kvern | Comments (3)

Most of the time, Creative Suite extension panels will need to know something about the state of their host application. If the extension, for example, displays a pop-up menu containing a list of the layers in the current document, the extension will need to know when the document closes, or when a new document opens. When the extension detects that the current document has changed, it can do whatever it needs to do to repopulate the menu.

While you could monitor the state of the application using polling—a function in a timing loop that checks the state of the application every so often—it’s much better to use event listeners. Event listeners are triggered whenever a particular event takes place, and run a function that responds to that event in some way. The only trick is that the application you’re interested in working with has to provide some sort of notification that something has happened that’s relevant to your extension. As you’ll see, that’s not always as straightforward as it sounds.

Because CS extensions are built on top of CSXS (Adobe’s Creative Suite Extensible Services framework), they can make use of CSXS “standardized” events.

Event Name Event Triggers:
documentAfterActivate When you activate the document.
documentAfterDeactivate When you deactivate the document
 (i.e., when you bring another document to the front).
applicationBeforeQuit When you quit the application.
applicationActivate When you activate the application.
documentAfterSave Immediately after you save the document.
 

 

Not all Creative Suite applications support the full range of CSXS “standardized” events, but the applications I want to work with—Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop—all support the events I’m most interested in. These applications also support other events—later in this post, I’ll show you how to create event listeners for those application-specific events.

We’ll also use two other CSXS events: StateChangeEvent.WINDOW_OPEN and StateChangeEvent.WINDOW_SHOW. These events are not part of the ”standardized” CSXS events—they apply to the state of the panel window itself. For more on general CSXS events, refer to the “com.adobe.csxs.events” section of the CSXS Library API Reference.

To test our event listeners, we’ll get and display the layers in the current document, and we’ll update the list of layers every time a document changes. I’m thinking that this is something that many CS extension developers will want to do.

You can find the project at:

DocumentWatcher
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Entering and Formatting Text

Posted on November 4, 2010 by Olav Kvern | Comments (6)

In my previous posts, I’ve shown how to draw objects in Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop. The idea was to create generic functions that “wrap” the application-specific code. Each function takes a set of coordinate locations, and uses those coordinates to draw a path. You don’t need to know the details of the application objects properties, and methods needed to draw the path—just send an array to the function, and the function will take care of drawing the path. The resulting paths will be as close to identical as we can make them, given the differences between the applications.

In this blog post, I’ll try to do the same thing for text. I’ll introduce a set of functions for entering text and doing some minor typesetting tasks in Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop. Send the function a string of text, a location (as a coordinate pair), a point size, and a font name, and the application-specific code in each “flavor” of the function will take care of creating and formatting the text. Again, I’ll try to have all three applications produce the same result.

While we’re at it, I’ll show how to get a list of fonts from the application and display the font names in a a ComboBox control in the example plug-in. Think of it as a bonus.

The example extension will create a sample document and position the text at the center of the document, but you can use the example makeText functions to draw text wherever you want.

You can find the example project for this post here:

text

Update: This project is now available via Import>Adobe Creative Suite Extension Builder>Remote Creative Suite SDK examples.

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Drawing Paths: The Basics

Posted on September 30, 2010 by Olav Kvern | Comments (3)

In my previous blog post, I presented a fairly complete extension panel for InDesign. This time, I’d like to step back a bit and talk about the process of developing an extension for three Creative Suite applications: Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop. We’ll be doing something pretty basic–drawing the same shape in all three applications. While we’re at it, we’ll create a framework we can use to draw any valid shape­. This framework will simplify and standardize the process of drawing a shape, and will work for almost any extension that needs to draw shapes.

In this example, we’ll create a generic extension that can run in any of the above applications, and we’ll keep our application specific code isolated from the overall workings of the extension.

It’s All in the (Application-Specific) Details

The trickiest part of this extension, in fact, is the application-specific code. Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop can all draw paths, but each of the applications has a slightly different way of performing the task. In all three applications, you can draw paths using the Pen tool, and the resulting shapes, from a scripting point of view, are made up of paths, which are, in turn, made up of path points. The names and the details of the scripting objects differ a bit between products. In Illustrator and Photoshop, for example, the basic drawing object is a pathItem; in InDesign, it’s a pageItem.

Next, the applications have different ways of dealing with measurement. We’ll need to use measurement values to specify horizontal and vertical coordinates if we’re going to position new path points in a document. In InDesign and Photoshop, you can change measurement units at any time; Illustrator, by contrast, always uses points when it’s being driven by a script. In this example, we’ll be using points, but, for your own scripts, you’ll need to convert measurement values to points before sending them to Illustrator.

In InDesign and Photoshop, path point coordinates are specified relative to the ruler zero point; in Illustrator, they’re specified relative to the lower-left corner of the artboard. Since the default location of the ruler zero point is the upper-left corner of the document in all three applications, this means that the paths in Illustrator will be upside down relative to the paths in the other programs, but we don’t need to worry about that right now.

Finally, Illustrator and InDesign have a number of “shortcuts” for drawing paths with specifc arrangements of points–rectangles, ellipses, regular polygons, etc. We’ll ignore those features in favor of a “one size fits all” drawing routine.

In this tutorial, I’ll present support routines that provide a consistent approach to drawing paths in these applications. The idea is to create a generic drawing function that you can use to build new creative effects (ornamental borders for certificates, for example) or wire into your new data driven graphics feature.

You can download the project here (note that this isn’t really a “finished” extension, it’s just a container for the drawing routines):

drawing
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MakeSideHeads: A Complete InDesign CS5 Panel

Posted on August 25, 2010 by Olav Kvern | Comments (18)

The MakeSideHeads example (download link below) shows how to create a fully functional InDesign CS5 panel using the Creative Suite Extension Builder and the CSAW and host adapter libraries for InDesign.

This extension demonstrates:

  • How to use CSXS events and event listeners.
  • How to use the host adapter library for InDesign to monitor and respond to application-specific events (i.e., events that are outside of the standard CXSX events)
  • How to work with InDesign’s find text preferences from ActionScript
  • Reading and writing CSXS preferences
  • How to display a modal dialog box from a CS Extension
  • A number of InDesign scripting tricks

Download a Zip archive containing the project here:
makesideheads

Update: This project is now available via Import>Adobe Creative Suite Extension Builder>Remote Creative Suite SDK examples.

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