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!