January 31, 2007

Of Birds & Bees

• Rick Lieder, whose BeeDreams macrophotography was mentioned earlier, has turned to birds with the lovely CloudBoxer.com
• Graham Jeffery (of smoke fame) has posted some insanely cool photos of hoverflies.  He’s also gotten into the bird world; nice landing gear on this guy. :-)
  

Useful Photoshop layer-handling scripts

Last week Ralf Berger, co-creator of Photoshop’s Vanishing Point tool (and formerly eng. manager for LiveMotion), asked me whether Photoshop offered a way to clean up files by deleting empty layers.  I knew that the Layers palette fly-out menu contains a command to delete hidden layers, but not one for blowing away those with no pixel content.  After a nudge towards the Photoshop JavaScript guide (installed in the application folder, btw), Ralf whipped up this script for deleting blank layers.  I’m posting it here in case it’s useful. (You may want to right-click/Ctrl-click the link to download the script, then put the file into your Photoshop folder under Presets/Scripts.)

On a related note,
I came across a Trevor Morris’s trove of handy-looking little scripts.  And for more PS scriptiness, including a good discussion forum, check out PS-Scripts.com.