Photoshop Extension: Opacity Editor

Today I’d like to introduce an extension I’ve created for Adobe Photoshop: Opacity Editor.

I like to take pictures, ok, I’m definitely not a professional photographer, but I still like to try to be one 🙂

In particular I like to take pictures at night, I like to take pictures of moving clouds, stars.. etc. And then I like to stack all the photos into a single document. The problem is that most of the times this Photoshop document has hundreds, if not thousands, of layers (and we’re talking about 40MP images) and, despite the fact that photoshop can barely survive after I’ve added all those layers to the document, the real problem comes after that.. In order to create a nice stacking effect it’s not just a matter of changing the blending mode of the different layers, but also to change their opacity.

Unfortunately Photoshop doesn’t have an option to manage the opacity of multiple layers at the same time, like, for instance, from 0 to 100 of all the selected layers.. or even more advanced options.

That’s why I’ve decided to make an extension (available here) for this. This is it’s pretty easy interface:

So basically what it does is: you select a bunch of layers in your document, then you create the bezier curve. Once you click on “Apply Opacity” the opacity of every selected layer will follow the designed curve value. Let’s make it easier. If you design a curve like this:

the first selected layer will have an opacity of 0 (completely invisible), while the last layer will have 100 as opacity. (If you’ve selected 100 layers, then the second one will have an opacity value of 1, the third of 2 and so on..)

These 2 images, for instance, have been created using this extension:

 

1200~ pics

 

The second one is the result of 1200 layers stacked together and without that extension I would probably still working on it!

And here’s an example of the Extension in action:

 

For more information and download:
https://www.adobeexchange.com/creativecloud.details.20327.html

Flash alpha GradientMatrix to PDF using purePDF

One of the most hard thing to traslate when creating pdf documents from existing flash movies is indeed the gradient matrix.

Not only because pdf and flash have 2 different coordinates system and because the gradient matrix is applied in 2 different ways, but also if you want to convert gradient with transparent colors inside.
Let me say that I’ve encountered the same issue Mario posted here, even if I made a little modification to his solution: GradientMatrix.as
This is the swf example. Click on the sprite to start the animation. It will rotate and translate both the sprite and its gradient matrix, then click again to stop the animation and create the pdf file at that frame.
SWF HERE
In order to create the correct gradient matrix with the right position and rotation in purePDF I’ve used the PdfShading.complexAxial static method in this way:
var cb_shading: PdfShading = PdfShading.complexAxial( writer, top_left.x, top_left.y, top_right.x, top_right.y, cb_colors, cb_ratios, true, true );

then for the alpha masking I’ve created a PdfTransparencyGroup applied to the alpha mask.

You can see my solution (which probably is not the best one, but it’s the one I discovered for now) in the code below.
[kml_flashembed movie=”/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/ExampleColorGradient2.swf” height=”300″ width=”400″ /]

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