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.