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how to place a copyright notice in the bottom right corner automatically, using photoshop actions

markus — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 00:52:52 +0000

photoshop actions allow you to record and automate frequently used procedures, much like the “record macro” feature does in microsoft office.
for example you could automatically insert a text or image into a photo, move it to the top left corner (0/0), set opacity etc., and merge the layers.
it’s that easy! well, almost.

usually, copyright notices are placed in the bottom right corner of a photo, so you’ll get a problem if you’re working with different image sizes – i.e. landscape and portrait orientation.
the top corner will always be at 0/0 pixels, but the position of the bottom right corner is variable.

i’ve been searching for a solution to this for a very long time, and eventually settled with two separate photoshop actions – one for standard 640×480 (landscape), and one for 480×640 (portrait) photos. everything else had to be modified manually.

then, cemal ekin posted a very valuable comment on alex king’s blog, which lets me do exactly what i want:

As I understand it, you have a text layer and you would like to position it on the lower right corner of the image offset by a given number of pixels from the bottom and the right edges. You can even have the standard text in a separate file if you like.
This process can be automated via an action too. Here it goes:

1. Make sure you have a background layer, if you don’t, create a blank layer anywhere then from the menu “Layers/New Background from this layer” options create a background layer.

2. Put your text anywhere on the stack, even bring it from a separate file and drag it on to your image that you want to stamp

3. Select the background and the text layers only (click on the BG layer to target it, then Ctrl-click on the gray area of the text layer)

4. Go to “Layer/Align/Bottom” and then “Layer/Align/Right”; now the text is touching the edges

5. Target the text layer only by clicking on the layer icon

6. Make sure that you have the “Pick tool” (press V to do that)

7. Using the up and left arrow keys move the text a set number of pixels from the bottom and the right edges

All the steps allow easy action creation, if you are careful, you can SLOWLY repeat the steps after you explore it once or twice while the action recording is turned on.

Enjoy,
Cemal

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useful wordpress plugins

markus — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 21:56:23 +0000

here’s a list of useful wordpress plugins that i use to extend the functionality of this blog:

akismet (plugin homepage) makes comment spam history.
all in one SEO pack (plugin homepage) takes care of search engine optimization.
around this date in the past (plugin homepage) shows posts from previous years.

plugin central (plugin homepage) lets me update plugins right from my dashboard.
revision control (plugin homepage helps the database loose weight by limiting the number of post revisions that are stored.
samsarin php widget (plugin homepage) allows me to use my own code in the sidebar, such as the random photo.
SEO slugs (plugin homepage removes stopwords like “a”, “the”, … from the post’s url.
sociable (plugin homepage) automatically adds links for social bookmarking to each post.
twitter tools (plugin homepage) imports twitter-messages into the sidebar, creates weekly twitter archives (“twitter weekly”) and announces new posts on twitter.
wordpress.com stats shows where readers came from, and what they read.
wordverify asks for a codeword before visitors can submit comments.
wp-footnotes (plugin homepage) allows for easy creation of footnotes in my posts.
yet another related posts plugin (plugin homepage) is probably the best plugin of its kind.

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a demonstration of hugin

markus — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 22:59:25 +0000

during a sight-seeing-tour through austria last year, i took some extra pictures of various sights for panorama-stitching. there’s a powerful panorama photo stitcher called hugin, that makes things very easy – and it’s open-source!

here’s an exapmle of what hugin can do:

i took a set of 11 pictures (not using a tripod!) to get a complete view of the collegiate church at stift melk (melk abbey), austria.

importing them into hugin, all i had to do was specify an estimation of the horizontal field of view (it’s automatically recognized from newer cameras), and hugin started computing away.

the last thing to do was checking the keypoints and remove bad ones (if there are any).

the only post-processing necessary for the resulting panorama was to crop the image, and (in this case) colour the very bottom of the image so that the otherwise black background wouldn’t stand out.

[view photos: hugin in action]

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the windows search dog and other annoying animated characters

markus — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 11:06:35 +0000

i’ve never been fond of windows’ animated search assistants, even though i must say that i liked Clippit (“Franz Klammer” in german) best of them all.

here’s part a blog post about microsoft’s history of animated character patents (including pictures):

It’s hard to take Clippy, Microsoft Bob, and Windows XP’s Search Assistant doggie seriously. But a dozen years’ worth of patents relating to the basic idea shows that Microsoft takes it very seriously indeed–and I’m convinced that someone, somewhere within the company is still working away at it.

The Secret Origins of Clippy

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firefox: important files and useful tweaks

markus — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 14:55:58 +0000

this is probably more of a “memo to self”-sort of post that saves me the time of searching, next time firefox decides to cause problems.
still, you might find some of it interesting:

save / backup / transfer saved passwords

You need to save 2 files from your profile folder, key3.db and signons3.txt
If you ever restore the passwords you need to copy both files back, they need to be kept together for passwords to work.
On WinXP, the profile folder is located here:
C:\Documents and Settings\\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\\

from support.mozilla.com

Export bookmarks to HTML automatically

Firefox 3 stores bookmarks in places.sqlite and uses JSON as the format for backups stored in the bookmarkbackups folder so, by default, bookmarks are no longer saved in HTML format. To allow bookmarks to be exported at shutdown to the Firefox profile folder as bookmarks.html, set browser.bookmarks.autoExportHTML to true.

from kb.mozillazine.org

Open bookmark groups in new tabs

If you open a group of bookmarks at once, Firefox’s default behavior is to replace any existing tabs with the newly opened pages. Set browser.tabs.loadFolderAndReplace (Boolean) to false, and opening groups of bookmarks will append new tabs to the existing window instead of overwriting existing ones.

from www.computerworld.com

Select just a word

The Boolean preference layout.word_select.eat_space_to_next_word governs one of Firefox’s tiny, but for me incredibly annoying, little behaviors. When you double-click on a word in a Web page to select it, Firefox automatically includes the space after the word. Most of the time I don’t want that; I just want the selection to stop at the end of the word. Setting this to false will defeat that behavior.

from www.computerworld.com

and of course: adblock plus one-click activation/deactivation

there are some more tweaks at maketecheasier.com

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fun with colours

markus — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 21:12:29 +0000

here’s a refreshing new way to search for photos:
using the idee inc. multicolr search lab, you can browse through flickr photos by specifying their colours.
the more colours you add, the more interesting it gets.

you can even search for images similar to one of yours’ with the BYO image search.

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piclens problem when switching between windows

markus — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 20:57:57 +0000

ever since mr. cheng ;) introduced the ingenuity that is piclens (a free firefox plugin), i’ve been enjoying a completely different way of looking at pictures online.

however, there is a situation when it’s acting weird, so in case you have the same problem as i did:

my main pc has a desktop which stretches over two displays, and i’m using firefox 2.0.0.16¹ with piclens 1.7.1.3900. when piclens is showing the 3D-wall on one of the displays and i click on a window on the other screen, piclens minimizes to a black rectangle just above the windows start button:

it behaves the same way when i use “alt+tab” to switch to a different window.
switching back to firefox, piclens seems to block any action there. double-clicking the black frame sometimes reopens the black screen, but doesn’t show any images.

the workaround: i reactivate the firefox window using “alt+tab” or “shift+alt+tab” (which goes backwards, and the piclens icon is at position 1 on my pc). not sure if this works for everybody, but it does for me.

oh, and you can now use piclens in my galleries when looking at any single album such as this.

i downgraded from firefox 3 because of two bugs that gave me a hard time: consistently ignoring shortcuts after firefox.exe has been running for a random period of time (especially using bookmarks w/ keyboard shortcuts), and frequently not shutting down properly.

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how to place a copyright notice in the bottom right corner automatically, using photoshop actions