Per the other thread, I am releasing an extension to showit to produce sloppy borders. I have tested this on CS2 on Windows, but I have not tested it on CS nor Mac machines. Before I unleash it, I would like a few beta testers to try it and make sure it installs and works correctly. In particular, I am looking for 4 combinations:

Windows/CS
Mac/CS
Windows/CS2
Mac/CS2

If you are interested, please respond here with your combination and I will email you the instructions. The 1st 4 responses (1 for each combination) gets it. Once the beta testers give me the green light -- I will release it to all.

hook a brudda up!

...I don't think Showit works with CS so your beta crew may be limited.

I'm on a Mac or PC with CS2

oh -- that makes it easier!

Ok, I sent you an email with the instructions. Have at it. Since you have both win/mac versions, you should be all the tester I need.

I'm on a Mac. Would love to give it a whirl.

Worked like a dream on my iBook G3/900, 640RAM. Look very nice. Thanks.

<edit> One suggestion, it might be better if each border were in there twice, one for horizontal images, and one for verticals. Call them Sloppy 1H, Sloppy 1V, etc. Or even better, is there a way for ShowIt to determine whether it's a vertical or horizontal and apply the appropriate one automagically?

Well I guess that means the beta test is a success! The 1H and 1V is a good idea, however, I tried the borders on vertical images and they looked ok so I really didn't see the need. Since you can add your own borders, you are free to add V and H borders.

Here is the location of the script:

http://www.jamescookphotography.com/sloppy

There are two versions of the scripts, one which is an extension to showit and the other that works without showit. So if you don't have showit yet (and why not???), you can still use the sloppy border script.

Enjoy.

Worked great on my machine too! Jim - you're awesome!

Here are some sample pics from the wedding last weekend!

[attachmentid=1191][attachmentid=1192][attachmentid=1193]

The actual border looked a little soft but I'm sure that can be fixed and my personal preference is to leave a bit more space between the border and the edge of the image but everyone likes it a different way so props to you for making a sweet addon!

Cheers,
DJ

Thanks for the kudos. Your photos make my borders look better than they actually are.

Agreed on the softness and spacing to the edge. Basically the borders could be much-much better. I guess my idea of quiting my day job and becoming a full time border creator needs to be rethought. But that is why I made it so that users can add their own borders. It will be interesting to see what borders people add and I hope that they will share them. When I add a smart algorithm when placing borders on the photograph that will help as well.

Tried it in the stand-alone version in CS, but came up with an error every time. Guess i'll have to wait for CS2. Thanks though...it looks great!! And much cheaper than the nitorix one. I just didn't have the money to spend on that one.

Well that sucks -- looks like CS2 is a prerequisite for it. Sorry for your trouble.

Something else I was thinking about when I couldn't sleep last night. I think the border script flattens the file. ShowIt flattens the files after it's done, so that doesn't need to happen within the border script. Also, if you want to do manual edits, it's nice to have the layers intact. It would make it consistent with the other effects.

But one could just step back through the history panel and do that, too.

Another thing, would it be difficult to make a copy of the background layer before resizing it so that the white strip around it would be transparent? Then the border would fade to clear rather than white.

I know, I know, give him and inch.... ;-)

I will take a look at removing the flattening. Sounds reasonable.

I don't understand the purpose of fading to clear? What does that buy you? I think it is pretty easy to do. I just don't understand what that accomplishes.

It was puking for me, I looked at the Javascript and saw that it was doing the width and height of the image (which were coming up in inches instead of pixels) for me, so when it resize the canvas it was tiny.

I added the following lines to the beginning of the sloppy.js file and it works good.

I guess it depends on how you have photoshop setup.

app.preferences.rulerUnits = Units.PIXELS
app.preferences.typeUnits = TypeUnits.PIXELS

showit should do that at the beginning for all effects. I will look into that. The individual effects shouldn't have to worry about units being in pixels. That should be a given.

Thanks for the bug report and the fix for it. Although I am a little confused as to why one needs to do that as I gathered from the documentation that since I use UnitValue("10 px") I was isoated from the user settings. I will have to go back and look at that. I will fix this in the next release.

I think he is talking about the standalone version since he referenced sloppy.js instead of effect.js.

Well, that's if you are just using it in Photoshop, not with ShowIT.

By the way, here are a bunch of Borders (free one's I've collected), that I've rigged up to work with this script.

http://www.johnandrewsphotography.com/cont...xtraborders.zip

You just need to extract them to the same directory as the sloppy script and
other borders that came with that script.


Andrew

Sweet! I just installed them and they work great. (well as great as my dumb script will work with them). Now if I can only figure out how in a script to figure out the pixel location of the deleted area of the templates I could have the script dynamically size the canvas so that none of the picture is covered up. I suspect I am either going to have to rely on people providing that information (maybe in the file name), or start learning how to write photoshop extensions in C.

Thanks for sharing!!!!

No Problem!!

That's so funny....I just added these borders to the script not one hour before you posted this. Andrea Rascaglia, right?

I commented out the second to last line of code and it got rid of the flattening. Change (or delete) the second to last line:


Thanks for putting this together Jim! It works really well! I noticed the 10px resize issue as well (probably based on what units your rulers are set to). I ended up with 10px x 10px files until I added the two lines of code John mentioned. Also, DJ mentioned the fuzzyness of the frame on certain images. I'm not sure, but I imagine it has to do with the size of the border file -- the three sloppy files probably need to be larger.

**Also: The link you have to the original discussion has two "http://" items in the address, so the link redirects to MS's site.

Thanks again! This thing is awesome!

Yep -- that is what to do. I am going to delete it in the next release.


Yes, John is a hero. I have this fixed in the next release as well.


Yea -- the sloppy borders that come with it works well for photos around 500px in size or less. The kind of sizes I use on my web pages so they worked well for me. But I figured that my lame borders would be replaced by super-duper ones that you all would create anyway. In hind site, I probably should have put in the extra effort to create nice borders considering all the discussion about them.

Fixed! thanks!

Thanks!

Haha, yeah - that's where I got them

not that I can run the script because I'm still on CS, but I had Kurt mention to me at PartnerCon that he noticed the finished file was in Adobe RGB format and not sRGB which is what most of us use. Can that be fixed by just changing the border files to sRGB and then saving them?

Thought I might mention that for those that didn't notice.

I played with this a little and I can't reproduce it. It seems to stay in sRGB for me.