A few secrets from the Deke Lounge, you ‘betcha!

Pho­to­shop? You ‘betcha!

When you visit the Deke Lounge to expe­ri­ence some liq­uid learn­ing make sure you take off your shoes. The incom­pa­ra­ble Deke McClel­land and Colleen Wheeler do another bang up job in the Lounge this week. Join­ing them again are Rus­sell Brown, the Bill Nye of Pho­to­shop (okay it’s just the white lab coats that make me think this) and John Nack Adobe wiz­ard and wordsmith.

This week the patrons of the Lounge dis­cuss Lay­ers and Fil­ters in Pho­to­shop. While imbib­ing at the Lounge,  John Nack let slip some inter­est­ing fac­toids about my beloved Pho­to­shop. It must have been the strong fil­tered and lay­ered Mar­tini that freed his already ver­bose tongue.

First cat that escaped the bag was that in CS4 the max­i­mum num­ber of lay­ers that you could have in an indi­vid­ual file is some­where on the order of 8,000. Though one of the commenter’s on deke.com say this isn’t true, but it only mat­ters on the amount of RAM you have. The com­menter labeled his com­ment as AFAIK,  which I had no idea what that meant. After con­sult­ing with Dr. Google, I dis­cov­ered it means ” As Far As I Know.” Con­sid­er­ing that I can’t see why you would want even 1,000 lay­ers let alone 8,000, I don’t think I’ll spend­ing any time test­ing this. So I’ll just trust John Nack on this one .

The sec­ond secret of Pho­to­shop John slipped was that although the max­i­mum size of a PSD is 200,000px x 200,000px it wasn’t always this way. At one point they were test­ing let­ting a PSD have a max image size of 2 mil­lion pix­els by 2 mil­lion pix­els, you know in case you wanted to lit­er­ally Pho­to­shop the moon. How­ever Adobe couldn’t find a pow­er­ful enough machine that wasn’t pre­vi­ously engaged try­ing to beat Gary Kas­parov  to work on a file that large. So were stuck with only 200,000 measly pix­els, who can do any­thing with that?

Finally and most awe­some was the rev­e­la­tion that the super secret  Adobe code name for the Pho­to­shop com­po­nent code is,  Fargo. As in Fargo the movie… you ‘betcha! The com­po­nent code is appar­ently the engine that runs the soft­ware and with the head of the code cut off adobe uses this code in its other suite of pro­grams (Flash, Illus­tra­tor, etc…) so they can use PSD’s and keep the struc­ture of the file.  Keep­ing the hier­ar­chi­cal struc­ture of image files, in a way turns Pho­to­shop into a sort of data­base pro­gram when you jump from pro­gram to pro­gram, which is very cool.

This is pretty inter­est­ing inter­nal info, and it even was so cool it got Colleen to tem­porar­ily speak in the 3rd per­son! Lis­ten to the Mar­tini Hour and you’ll see. In addi­tion to this ver­sion, all the pre­vi­ous ver­sions of the code were also named after other Coen Brother’s films,  includ­ing Blood Sim­ple, I sure hope Rais­ing Ari­zona was in there.

Man, Pho­to­shop, pro­gram­ming and Coen Brother’s? TRIPLE GEEK SCORE! Also the before men­tioned com­men­ta­tor, who claims his name is one Jeff Tran­berry said:

The com­po­nent code names come from the Min­nesota engi­neer­ing team, specif­i­cally Tim Wright, who’s a huge Coen Bros. fan (The Coens are orig­i­nally from MN).

I can’t believe I am actu­ally quot­ing some­one from the inter­net!  But it seems legit enough to me. On a creepy note when research­ing this I did find that Tim­o­thy Wright, the Adobe Sys­tems Engi­neer  in ques­tion donated in the 2008 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion. See what sort of weird infor­ma­tion you can find on the inter­net! Though the elec­tions com­mis­sion said pre­cious lit­tle about the film habits of Mr. Wright.

Go check out the Deke Lounge.… and don’t for­get to take off your shoes!

Related posts:

1. The Essen­tial Approach to Mask­ing with Deke McClelland