June 16, 2007

Photoshop+Matlab=Art

One of the sleeper features making its debut in Photoshop CS3 Extended is its ability to interface with MATLAB, the number-crunching toolkit from Mathworks.  The capability was added for developers & technical users, but now it's been turned to art.  Dr. Woohoo (aka Drew Trujillo) has created Color Combinatorics, integrating the two apps in pursuit of beautiful color harmonies.  He writes,

For me, it simply means that we can now ‘drive’ Photoshop by writing code in MATLAB while taking advantage of a *very* powerful engine with a superior supporting set of libraries (called ToolBoxes). Think of MATLAB as giving you the ability to write your own plug-ins for Photoshop.

You can check out a finished piece (9,261 sets of 3 colors) on Flickr, along with other interesting pieces.  Drew has written up a whole pile of notes on integrating Photoshop & MATLAB, so stop by his site to learn more.

Elsewhere in the world of interesting generative graphics:

  • Drew's In The Mod project analyzes the works of famous painters, and it now lets you download color swatches in the Adobe Swatch Exchange format (compatible with Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign). [Via]
  • Robert Hodgin and the Barbarian Group, creators of the beautiful Magnetosphere, have turned it into a visualizer for iTunes.  It's freely downloadable from their site.
  • Leon Hong has made some groovy bits using Processing.
Posted by John Nack at 05:28 PM on June 16, 2007

Comments

Greg — 12:22 PM on June 21, 2007

I work at a Scientific Research Institute and a lot of my clients work intensely with Matlab and other math applications. I was looking for more tutorials dealing with Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended + MATLAB, but I was having a hard time finding tutorial resources on how to interface the two applications. I also wanted to find resources that talked more about possible applications between the two. I am not an Matlab expert by any means, but if I can figure out how to easily interface the two applications, I might be able to help expand my clients results with the two programs working together. I looked at Drew's site and it was helpful to certain extent. I was just wondering if anybody had some good (hopefully free access) sites or even book resources that would help me learn more about the interplay between PS and Matlab

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