Creating Custom Panels for PhotoShop CS4

I can't believe the amount of creative work I have been finding myself doing these days. I find myself wanting to better my workflow constantly. I like that Adobe keeps coming up with cool and useful solutions for us to play with to help us get the work done as fast as possible.



I downloaded a very useful tool from http://labs.adobe.com the other day named Adobe Configurator 1.0. This very easy yet powerful tool which is an Adobe Air app built with Flex that will allow you to customize Photoshop. It is almost like having a scene or level builder for your favorite game. It can help you build custom panels with tools and commands that you need and use frequently. It also keeps them conveniently organized together. It helps you seriously speed up production work and helps you stay in the groove with everything just the way You need it!


The Opening Splash Screen


An Empty Panel on the Canvas.


The Tools Accordion selection exposed.


The Command Accordion selection exposed.

For the programmers that need a little more, there are plenty of options for you as well. You can embed a swf that can talk to Photoshop via the PatchPanel AS3 framework and build a custom GUI in Flash or Flex to control not only Photoshop but most of the CS4 Suite for some crazy automated desktop publishing solutions.


This is the script text editor.

BrandDoozie Public Beta Launched!

Yesterday we launch our first public Beta of BrandDoozie. This RIA allows users to create instant marketing materials for any business online in minutes.

The tool’s 3-step process leads to branded sales sheets, postcards, business cards, letterheads and more that can be downloaded in the industry standard PDF format suitable for printing to a variety of output devices including high resolution professional printing, and soon, ordered directly from professional printers as well.

You start by picking a general template design from a gallery that’s divided into style categories or industries like Professional Services, Healthcare, and Travel. Header fonts, Body Fonts ( for the main text copy) and colors can be selected and tweaked.

The second step you move on to creating a two-lined logo with its own customized fonts (You can select from about 100 Professional Font Families from the most famous font foundries on the planet), letter spacing, and sizes. This is the most advanced online LogoBuilder on the market and can style each character individually to obtain very unique designs. We will be adding more features soon that will let you upload your own logo's to use in the document designs.

The final step takes your customizations and generates the aforementioned business materials with them. This step also inserts your custom logo in the document and allows you to customize the color of the logo with your brand safe colors. Default photos can be swapped in and out (from either the site’s stock collection or up to 25mb of uploads of your own photos), and the copy can be changed to suit your needs (add your phone number and other details to the business card, for example). With our Design Safe technology you can apply different paragraph styling and coloring without compromising the design of the Brand.

I will go into further detail about the tools and servers used on this project, But I will give you a little hint... Adobe

Wahoosie you can see Branddoozie!

Well, I am very pleased to announce Branddoozie. I am officially allowed to talk about a project we have been working on for awhile with numerous Adobe Technologies. I will be able to talk more about the technologies used in later posts. Because it will take few post to explain them all.

You will notice right off however, that we used Flex 2.0 for the Client Development. Can't wait to go for some AIR we have just been too busy with other stuff. We have recorded a Adobe Acrobat® Connect Professional meeting with Chris Kitchener from Adobe. We thought it was time to give a little sneak-peak of what is around the corner for On-Demand Printing.

We should have a beta up very soon!

Check it out here:

https://admin.adobe.acrobat.com/_a295153/p60841576