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Old Nurd Attacks D.A.M With New Weapons
4/21/02 | self

Posted on 04/21/2002 5:30:09 AM PDT by pt17

There's a good number of FReepers who, thankfully, do very creative things with photoshop and images. Having gotten up early this morning to do a pic for a presentation, I did my first bit of artwork for a work presentation using the new release of Photoshop and thought some of you might be interested in a thread about it and other related matters, especially Digital Assets Management (i.e., DAM). Being one of those people who was forever losing images and other stuff amid the clutter of disc and zip drives, I did two things to solve the problem: Upgrade to Photoshop 7 and build a D.A.M. system. These two subjects are interrelated since one of Photoshop 7's most important new features is a file browser. First a quick commentary on Photoshop's new features. There's new stuff to like.
Photoshop 7 Interface  
 
There are a number of things to like about Photoshop 7. Most obvious is the new file browser, which displays thumbnails and file information. You can more readily find, organize and access your images. You can right-click on thumbnails to open, select, rename, delete, rotate and rank your artwork. The next most likable thing about this release is the paint and brush engine. There's a greater variety of customizable brushes and settings. The new "healing brush" is very useful. It operate like the cloning tool but preserves the original texture, tonality and shading of the retouched area. Other new features include enhanced web output and functions. All in all, I thought this release was worth the upgrade price. Now on to the D.A.M. stuff.

New D.A.M Weapon

Given the attention that's being paid to Photoshop's new file browser, some of you might like to see a system I built by myself to solve the problem of managing images and other digital assets. In showing you this D.A.M. (Digital Asset Management) system, I am showing off a bit but mostly demonstrating (a) what can be done in the way of file browsing and (b) that old dogs can learn useful new tricks (take note you young whippersnappers :-).

This system, whose interface is shown below, is totally Internet-based and uses a thin-client browser (DHTML & thin Java applet) for the user interface. As a result, I can manage a whole host of digital assets, including MS Office and HTML/XML documents from virtually anywhere. The system also handles zipping/unzipping files and FTP. The interface simply consists of a windows-like directory and a thumbnail viewer. All command functions are available by right-clicking either the directory item or the thumbnail. Input and information forms use pop-up, modeless windows. All objects can be viewed and/or heard by clicking on the thumbnail.

D.A.M Interface

Please note that this D.A.M. system is not a product and not for sale. It was developed solely by myself, for my use and mostly on my own time. My firm did provide me with limited R&D time and resources in exchange for their using it to demonstrate technical capability. The development effort took several months and was almost more fun than I could stand. I welcome your comments, especially your thoughts about the new Photoshop release.


TOPICS: Computers/Internet
KEYWORDS: computers; digitalassets; images; internet; photoshop
Apologies for the long picture load time.
1 posted on 04/21/2002 5:30:09 AM PDT by pt17
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To: summer
Thought your or some of your photoshop friends might be interested in this. pt
2 posted on 04/21/2002 8:05:22 AM PDT by pt17
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