Pimp Your Photoshop Zoomify with OpenZoom
Part of my passion for OpenZoom is the promotion of the beauty of large photos on the web and giving people the right tools to publish them. Enabling people to publish their images means building tools that support and enhance the workflow they're already familiar with.
You might know that since version CS3 Adobe Photoshop has a great built-in feature for exporting high-resolution images with Zoomify. The feature works really great. Although it took my machine a couple of minutes, I've managed to export a beautiful 86400x43200 pixel version of the NASA Blue Marble images. The feature would be perfect if it wasn't for the not so perfect, not so smooth Zoomify viewer that is used to view the exported image.
Scratching Your Own Itch
Therefore, while enjoying the calm of the holidays, I sat down and developed an OpenZoom viewer that you can use as an drop-in replacement for the built-in Zoomify viewer in Adobe Photoshop.
Demo: OpenZoom Viewer for Adobe Photoshop
New and improved viewer built with the OpenZoom SDK:View Demo | View Source
Features
- Fullscreen support
- Mouse navigation (click to zoom in and Shift-click to zoom out)
- Mouse wheel support in all browsers (scroll to zoom)
- Keyboard navigation (Pan with W, S, A, D or arrow keys, Zoom with + / – or I and O, Show All with H, Fullscreen with F.)
- Context Menu support
- Standards-compliant Flash embed through SWFObject
- 6 templates — Normal / Fullscreen: black, gray and white.
- Just 40KB — 100% Flash, no Flex.
- 100% Open Source. No branding.
Demo: Zoomify Viewer for Adobe Photoshop
For comparison, this is the old Zoomify viewer in Photoshop:View Demo
Download
- Download OpenZoom Viewer Templates
for Adobe Photoshop CS3/CS4 (ZIP - 86KB).- For installation and tutorials, read the instructions in README.txt
- Enjoy and let me know what you come up with!
Update — March 25, 2009
The OpenZoom Viewer Templates received an update in the form of a 0.3 release and are now known as OpenZoom Tango.Update — August 9, 2009
With the 0.5.2 release, OpenZoom Tango has moved from Google Code to GitHub. Additionally, OpenZoom Tango is now licensed under the MPL 1.1/GPL 3/LGPL 3 licenses. P.S. To get started, check out this great tutorial called Zoomify High Resolution Images With Photoshop CS3.