I've finally pushed out a public version of the faux photo mat builder that I mentioned a month ago:

It's been a ridiculous amount of work to build, and then almost an equal amount of work to write up the presentation. I have no idea why I spend so much time on something that few people will ever use, but there we are. You can read about it here.

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The room I use as my office at home has a layout not good for much of anything but the bedroom it was designed to be, but space is always tight in Japan, so one makes do as best one can. In this case, my desk is "floating" (not up against a wall as I used to have it when I used a different room for my office) and faces a set of floor-to-ceiling closet doors. This unorthodox arrangement allows the rest of the room to be gainfully employed with bookshelves, exercise stuff, and a bigger-than-most-Japanese-houses La-Z-Boy we brought with [...]

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This post is a request for ideas from Photoshop-savvy folk, about how to best approach a particular Photoshop issue I'm facing.

So, I'm working on a Photoshop CS5 script to generate photo-realistic fake matting around an image, for when you want to display a print on the wall, but don't want to go to the trouble of having matting custom cut and fitted. Once it's done, I'll join the calendar-template-building script I built long ago, which has been well received over the years.

It's trivial to make a fake-looking fake mat in Photoshop, but it's quite another thing to make [...]

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An article I read today included the author's speculation that:

"the Verizon iPhone is expected to add a few more billion dollars to Apple's bottom line"

"A few more billion dollars" would be big money to me, but it's probably not all that big a deal to a company the size of Apple (the 2nd largest company in America). Still, it brought to mind something Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer said in April 2007, a couple of months before the iPhone was released. In an interview with USA Today, Mr. Balmer said:

" There's no chance that the iPhone is going [...]
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I've just pushed a major update to my Picasa Face-Data Import plugin for Adobe Lightroom so that it now uses new plugin features of Lightroom 3 to maintain real keywords for the names associated with images.

It's much less kludgy than the version for Lightroom 2, but using Picasa on images in your Lightroom catalog still comes with major caveats. See the plugin's page and last year's "Giving Up on Picasa Face Recognition" for more.

However, if you do use Picasa and Lightroom in tandem, this plugin makes for a reasonable way to import Picasa's face-recognition data to Lightroom.

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