The interesting value of the Swatches palette is the ability to load custom swatch collections, so you can quickly access to specific colors without having to remember any numeric color values.

For instance, you can create a custom swatch with the colors you use in your project logo, and later use this swatch when designing the website layout, so you will be sure colors will match (all in all, they are the same ones!).

When you save a Swatch from Photoshop, it will create an Adobe Color .ACO file.

Knowing how Photoshop writes this file will allow us to create our custom swatches with php or another language.

Anatomy of a .ACO file

ACO files are binary files made by 16-bit integers made of two sections. All values are hexadecimal

The first section of the file is made this way:

0001: starts with 1 because it’s section 1…

number of colors: this represents the number of colors in the swatch, such as 0001, 0002, 000f… probably the limit is really 65535 (FFFF) even if I don’t see the point in having so much colors.

Then for each color, we have:

0000: let’s call it a separator…

red component: you have to write it twice, so if you red component is 0A, you must write 0A0A

green component: same thing as the red one

blue component: guess what?

0000: another separator

And the first section is over. Next section starts with

0002: being the second one…

number of colors: same thing as for the first section

Then for each color we have:

0000: separator

red component: same as before

green component: same as before

blue component: same as before

0000: separator

0000: separator (yes, another)

color name length + 1: do you want to call the color “my favourite red”? Then the length is 16 so the final value will be 17 = 0011 in hexadecimal

the name itself: this is the name itself coded in UTF-16, so if your color name is “c1″ the name will be 0063 0031

0000: separator

Make a file following these rules, and you’ll have your .ACO file ready to be loaded in Photoshop.

Why should you do that? Well, in case you want to export color schemes you found somewhere in the web… and here it is a php function that starting with a string with one or more colors in hexadecimal format (such as 000000FFFFFF for black and white), returns the ACO format.

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function hex_to_aco($hex){
     $number_of_colors = strlen($hex)/6;  
     $n = sprintf('%04x',$number_of_colors);
     $string = "0001".$n;
     for($x=0;$x<$number_of_colors;$x++){
          $string.= "0000";
          $string.= substr($hex,$x*6,2).substr($hex,$x*6,2);
          $string.= substr($hex,$x*6+2,2).substr($hex,$x*6+2,2);
          $string.= substr($hex,$x*6+4,2).substr($hex,$x*6+4,2);
          $string.= "0000";
     }
     $string.= "0002".$n;
     for($x=0;$x<$number_of_colors;$x++){
          $string.= "0000";
          $string.= substr($hex,$x*6,2).substr($hex,$x*6,2);
          $string.= substr($hex,$x*6+2,2).substr($hex,$x*6+2,2);
          $string.= substr($hex,$x*6+4,2).substr($hex,$x*6+4,2);
          $string.= "0000";
          $string.= "0000";
          $color_name = "pic2col $x";
          $string.= sprintf('%04x',strlen($color_name)+1);
          for($y=0;$y<strlen($color_name);$y++){
               $string.= sprintf('%04x',ord($color_name{$y}));  
          }
          $string.= "0000";     
     }
     return($string);
}

You can find this function used in pic2col, at the end of the color sequence you will find a link to download it as a ACO file.

I tested it in CS4 on XP and Vista and it works. Waiting for feedback.

In this video I unveil 5 killer tips I use almost every day.

Follow some simple steps and you will be able to:

1) Remove objects from a photo

2) Correct red eyes

3) Make a photo look older

4) Create realistic fog

5) Turn a night scene into a day one

All in a single video, quick and easy to understand

This free package comes in two versions: as a Photoshop plugin or as a standalone software.

I tested the PS plugin and that’s what I think about it:

First, on the official site you will find virtualPhotographer is compatible with Photoshop CS3 and older

But I successfully installed (and used) it on my CS4 Master Collection version.

This is a clearly unretouched digital photo:

and this is what you see when you launch the plugin

Now you can work with more than 200 preset effect with just one click or creating (and saving) your own ones adjusting several parameters.

That’s what I got with one click:

This is “mountain” effect, one of my favourites

Do you need some dramatic black and white? This is “Hollywood”

Compare it with the standard “desaturate” adjustment people use to get a B/W image…

no more playing with curves to get a decent B/W image…

Do you need a vintage image? “Less tungsten” is the one you need

And I could continue for hours… so go to www.optikvervelabs.com and download this amazing plugin.

Satisfaction guaranteed.

Here it is:

Five DVDs with the suite itself and one DVD with two hours of video footage about using CS4 softwares.

Let me remember you the software included:

InDesign CS4
Photoshop CS4 Extended
Illustrator CS4
Acrobat 9 Pro
Flash CS4 Professional
Dreamweaver CS4
Fireworks CS4
Contribute CS4
After Effects CS4
Adobe Premiere Pro CS4
Soundbooth CS4
Adobe OnLocation CS4
Encore CS4
Adobe Bridge CS4
Adobe Device Central CS4
Dynamic Link
Version Cue CS4

I still haven’t installed it, so I can’t say, at the moment, if there is something made exclusively for the box retail edition, something the downloadable version does not have.

Let me start from another point of view. There isn’t any free alternative to Photoshop. As far as I know, there isn’t any alternative at all to Photoshop.

But if you aren’t going to use all Photoshop features or you are somewhere around the world and for some reason your Photoshop crashes and need a quick, somewhat powerful and free way to mess around with photos, colors and shapes, you may find this list useful.

They’re listed in alphabetical order, so the first isn’t necessarily the best.

But I tried to point you to a couple of softwares for each OS, such as Windows, OS X and Linux, and some interesting online tools.

I didn’t try personally all the softwares, so the description of each one is taken from their sites. I just tried to download them for free and install them on various machines. Screenshots too are taken from their sites.

If you used some of them, leave a review comment.

Artweaver – Windows

Artweaver is a Windows Freeware program to simulate natural brush tools

ChocoFlop – OS X

ChocoFlop allows you to edit your photos or design stuff using Apple’s CoreImage technology. It takes advantage of the power of your graphics card.

Cinepaint – Linux, OS X

CinePaint is a deep paint image retouching tool that supports higher color fidelity than ordinary painting tools.

FotoFlexer – online

FotoFlexer is the world’s most advanced online photo editor

GIMP – Windows

GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages.

A photographer in my company choosed it as the best software for photo retouching… even better than Photoshop. I disagree, but I’m informing you about that.

Krita – Linux

Krita is a painting and image editing application for KOffice. Krita is part of KOffice since version 1.4. Krita contains both ease-of-use and fun features like guided painting (never before has it been so easy to airbrush a straight line!) and high-end features like support for 16 bit images, CMYK, L*a*b and even OpenEXR HDR images.

Paint.NET – Windows

Paint.NET is free image and photo editing software for computers that run Windows. It features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools.

Phoenix – online

All the Photoshop features you actually need, at a fraction of the price (but I managed to save a photo for free)

Photoshop Express – online

Adobe’s free photo editing tool

Picasa – Windows, Linux

Google’s free photo editing tool

Picnik – online

Does not require you to register to start playing with it

Pixen – OS X

Mainly designed from top to bottom for pixel artists—people who make low-resolution raster art like the sprites you see in old video games.

Pixia – Windows

The original Japanese Edition was created and developed by the author, Isao Maruoka, but has also been aggressively raised by its fans, which makes this software to be quite unique and different from other tools.

Pixlr – online

Another one that does not require registration to mess with. Great interface in my opinion

Pizap – online

Same as before, no registration required, but a bit limited compared to other online editors

Queeky – online

Queeky is an online drawing community with unique drawing tools and creative users from all around the world.

Splashup – online

Splashup, formerly Fauxto, is a powerful editing tool and photo manager. With all the features professionals use and novices want, it’s easy to use, works in real-time and allows you to edit many images at once.

SUMO Paint – online

SUMO Paint offers professional and easy to use tools for creating and editing images within a browser. SUMO Paint is a free image editing software that gives you the opportunity to create, edit and comment images online with powerful tools and layer support.

These icons are free for personal and commercial uses but I needed something a bit different (and I have some keys on my keyboard that aren’t listed there) so I decided to draw my own icons.

The result worked pretty well in my opinion

so I decided to release the layered PSD file to let you make your own keys.

In the PSD you will find a white and a black key, ready to be customized.

If you manage to make an entire set of icons using these files, let me know and I will be glad to add them to the blog.

Download the PSD files.

I already published Vintage colors effect action for Photoshop and Create a vintage photo effect in Photoshop but I decided to turn into an action this tutorial from CreateBlog.

This action can convert a photo like this one (made by Tommy Huynh)

into this one

in a matter of seconds.

Download the action.

I wanted something random, with a style that reminds old style arcades.

I found this tutorial and I modified it to fit to my needs.

Then I developed an action to optimize and speed up the entire process.

This is the result of the action, obviously always random.

It’s not a state-of-the-art action but is what I need, and you can custom some level styles to use it in a profitable way.

Download the action and give it a try

I have already created an action to simulate this effect in Vintage colors effect action for Photoshop, but I am sure you’ll like this effec too.

Follow me through this very easy tutorial and you’ll find by yourself how easy is to achieve this effect.

1) Open your photo

2) Set your foreground and background colors respectively to #ff0000 and #00ff00

3) Duplicate the photo layer

4) With the newly created layer use a Gradient Map

5) On the same layer, use Blending Options

6) Select Blend Mode to Color and Opacity to 50%

7) Flatten the image

8) Apply an Add Noise filter to the only layer you should have

9) Set the filter with 2% Gaussian Monochromatic values

10) Enjoy the result

You may need to play with the last two steps values in order to fit the effect to your needs.

And for the laziest of you, I made an action that does the task automatically! Download the action.

The real challenge is to code an action that creates an outer space without any drawing by the user.

The result I got, is a quite realistic outer space, and every time I play the action I get a different image.

Look at the examples:

As you can see, results are quite good, especially for game design.

Download the action and run into Photoshop.

I developed it with CS2 and I cannot test with any other platform so if you have a different version and the action runs, please let me know.

The action stops itself when you can change the image size and when you can change the background color of the nebulas you will created.

Enjoy it and let’s start coding space games…